


Good Enough

by EddyCKeane



Category: SOMA (Video Game)
Genre: Depression, Discussions of Suicide, Explicit Language, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Mild Gore, Post-Apocalypse, Slow Build, how to survive as an immortal robot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-03-03
Packaged: 2018-05-22 17:43:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 53,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6088674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EddyCKeane/pseuds/EddyCKeane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was not the plan.  The plan was for you to transfer your mind to a power suit and take the Climber down to site Tau, where you would find the ARK and launch it into space the way the original PATHOS-II team was supposed to.  The plan was to get you and Catherine on the ARK and go with the rest of humanity into a virtual reality that would keep you alive and safe on a satellite and far, far away from the the wreckage of you apocalyptic planet.  The plan was for you to get on the ARK and leave.</p>
<p>Nowhere in the plan were you supposed to wake up alone at the bottom of the fucking ocean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This started as my NaNoWriMo 2015 project, which I posted to my tumblr. Now I've transferred it here! It's had some minor editing since the first posting, so some things may be different this time around.
> 
> The focus of this story is on the direct aftermath of launching the ARK and what it means for those left behind. 
> 
> There is some mild gore and discussions of suicide, so tread lightly!

 

* * *

 

_Here’s a riddle for you. I woke up in my bed today a hundred years ago. Who am I?_

 

* * *

 

 

“Thought you guys would’ve had better bandwidth in the future,” you say a little ruefully, eyes glued to the loading bar of the brain scan in front of you.  Site Phi’s structure under you is a seismic riot as the Space Gun prepares to launch, your vision a mess of jittery lights and burning after images.  The launch system for the Space Gun is running on the right hand screen, an automated voice counting down the launch of the ARK.

 

At ten seconds to launch, Catherine’s scan is complete but your own scan has barely started.

 

At five seconds the progress bar hasn’t even gotten to the halfway mark and there is a real goddamn chance that the scan might not finish in time.  “You gotta be kidding me!  Come on, load!”

 

Four seconds.  The bar is still moving, lazy and torturous.  You stare down at the screen with all the focus you have, as if by sheer force of will you can make this stupid computer get you loaded on the ARK before it leaves.

 

Three seconds.  The bar moves faster, it’s going to---

 

Two seconds.  100% bar.  Scan complete.

 

One second.  You scream “Yes!  Fuck yeah!  We made it!” as your vision whites out and the sound in the launch bay expands and compresses the ocean water around you like a shrink wrap vice.  You’re getting on the ARK.  You’re going to get out of this fucking hell hole at the bottom of the ocean and you’re going to live in the perfect world, a virtual reality where everyone is pristine and whole and you can live out the life you never had.  Finally, _finally_ you’ll be safe.  Finally you’ll be _happy_.

 

Your vision comes back to you slowly, your optics struggling to readjust from blinding bright to oppressive dark.  The roar of the Space Gun bullet is receding as it makes it’s way out of site Phi and up through the ocean and into the atmosphere.  You are still in the Pilot Seat, still looking at the brain scan screen, still in the launch room at site Phi.

 

The Pilot Seat’s HUD goes dark and lifts--- revealing the main terminal for the Space Gun, two screens showing you the full bars of yours and Catherine’s brain scans, as well as the tracking data for the ARK.

 

“I’m still here . . . ?”  You feel as if the water has compressed around you again, as if you cannot breathe.  The screen to your right has switched from the ARK tracker to a full system check of the ARK as it rockets into space.  The Phi launch room does not change otherwise.  “I’m still here.”

 

This can’t be right.  It just _can’t_ be.  “Catherine?  Catherine!”

 

The screen with the brain scan status vanishes, and is replaced by a static picture of Catherine’s face.  The Omnitool still works, her Cortex chip is still in the port, _her brain is still here_ \---  Her voice comes through loud and clear from the console.  “I’m here.”

 

“What the hell happened--- what went wrong?”

 

“Nothing,” says Catherine, which is a bald-faced _lie_.  “They’re out there, among the stars.  We’re here.”

 

“No,” you say, curling your fists around the arms of the Pilot Seat, “we were getting on the ARK, I saw it.  It finished loading just before it launched.”

 

“Yeah, I saw.”

 

“Then why are we still here?” you shout.

 

“Simon, I can’t keep telling you how it works,” snaps Catherine, her calm demeanor cracking as she goes on.  “You won’t listen!  You know why we’re here: you were copied on to the ARK, you just didn’t carry over.  You lost the coin toss.  We both did.  Just like Simon at Omicron, just like the man who died in Toronto a hundred years ago!”

 

“No no no no no!”  You grab at your head, fingers digging into the dome of your power suit helmet.  “This is bullshit!  We came all this way.  We launched the ARK!”

 

“I know it sucks, but our copies are up there.  Catherine and Simon are both safe on the ARK, be happy for them,” says Catherine in her forcefully metered tone, and you hate how hard she’s trying to be poised, to maintain grace when the real fucking truth of it is that you’re both exactly where you don’t want to be.

 

“Are you crazy?  We’re going to die down here, with those fuckers living it large on a spaceship!  They’re not us!”  The lights of the launch room are slowly switching off, and with each vanished light you feel your anxiety tick higher.  “They are not us!”

 

Catherine’s retort is as cold as the feeling that eels it’s way into your subbrain.  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Simon.  I’m proud of what we did.  We made sure that something of the hundreds of thousands of years of human history survived--- that something lives on.”

 

“No, fuck this!  Fuck this--- fuck you!  Fuck _you_ , Catherine!  You lied.  And I believed in you, I _trusted_ you.  You said we’re getting on the _fucking_ ARK!”

 

“We _are_ on the ARK, you idiot!” screams Catherine, and the right hand screen goes dark.  Catherine’s face flickers, the Omnitool status bars fluctuating wildly as she snaps, “I didn’t lie!  I can’t be held responsible for your goddamn ignorance, you _fucking---!_ ”

 

Something in the Omnitool breaks, fingers of electricity tracing through it and the main screen, and the whole terminal goes dark.  CRITICAL FAILURE appears at the top of the black screen, followed by a string of PLEASE RETRY prompts as the computer tries and fails to repair the damage.

 

You stare.  “Catherine?”  The terminal remains unresponsive, the Omnitool a blank box hooked into dead port.  “Please don’t leave me alone.  Catherine?”

 

There’s nothing.  There’s no one there, no one who can hear you, and your voice breaks as you beg, “Catherine?”

  
You are alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	2. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon Jarrett has reached the end of the line, only to find out that the line keeps going

As far as your memory is concerned, you sat down in David Munshi’s brain scan chair in Toronto, blinked, and found yourself in the eerily abandoned power plant Upsilon, one of eight PATHOS-II sites located on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.  Down here there were robots trying to hurt you and humans that were either dead or infested with black structure gel that tethered them to ad hoc life support in the most misguided and horrific attempt at sustaining life you have ever seen.

 

As far as your memory is concerned, a comet hit the Earth faster than a blink.  The ocean rose up and swallowed cities like air, the sky caught fire, the animals withered to dust.  Smoke choked the atmosphere, smothered all life in a toxic slurry of heat and poison, and everything _burned._

  
As far as your memory is concerned, the entire human race died in the space of a blink.

 

* * *

 

  _“There must be something wrong.  Can’t you run a diagnostic or something?  Catherine---”_

 

* * *

 

 

You wake up alone.

Two of the overhead lights are on, both of the doors are sealed closed, and the computer terminal screens for the Dive Room and power suits are flickering black and blue.  It’s quiet, just the subaural vibration of Omicron’s generators and the creaking of the unkept submarine structure.  You are still in the Pilot Seat, and a screen to your left tells you that the brain scan is complete.

“Hello?  Catherine?”

You leverage yourself up from the Pilot Seat and step carefully into the Dive Room.  Power suit station D is still open, with a perfectly intact (yet empty) glass structure gel vat off to the side, exactly as you left it.  Where there should have been the slumped over power suit D, corpse saturated in structure gel, powered by a lithium-sulfur battery pack, and punched through with a robo-face and Cortex chip, there is nothing.

“Catherine what happened?  What’s going on?”  you ask, but you think you know _exactly_ what’s going on.  “Catherine?”

The Dive Room console, the main one that you plugged the Omnitool containing Catherine’s Cortex chip into so she could help you navigate Omicron, is still showing the status of the dive suit you operated on.  There are other programs running in auxiliary screens to the left, a scroll of ever changing numbers and something that looks like manifest log.  A clock on the main screen tells you it’s 13:47 on May 14th, 2104.

The port for the Omnitool is empty.

“Shit.”

You run your hand over the empty port, as if it’s just a trick of the light that is messing you up, that the Omnitool is just invisible until you touch it.  But it’s not a trick of the light or of your optics or whatever else, and your hand hits nothing but metal and air.  The port remains empty, the power suit station D remains empty, your fucking hope remains empty.

“What the _fuck_ , Catherine?” you snarl into the empty room, your fist coming down on the Omnitool port with a force you cannot feel.  “Why the _fuck_ did you leave me here?”

This was not the plan.  The plan was for you to transfer your mind to a power suit and take the Climber down to site Tau, where you would find the ARK and launch it into space the way the original PATHOS-II team was supposed to.  The plan was to get you and Catherine on the ARK and go with the rest of humanity into a virtual reality that would keep you alive and safe on a satellite and far, far away from the the wreckage of you apocalyptic planet.  The plan was for you to get on the ARK and _leave._

Nowhere in the plan were you supposed to wake up alone at the bottom of the fucking ocean.

She left you behind--- they both left you behind, her and the Other You, the one that is using the power suit to ride the Climber down into the Abyss, the one who woke up when you didn’t and walked away when you couldn’t.  They left you here at Omicron, with the dead and the dying and the monsters that will kill you if the pressure doesn’t kill you first.

You can’t keep looking at the computer terminal and the blatant evidence of her betrayal, so you turn away and pace.  You storm around the room, as if you can breathe in more oxygen and wear down your muscles and ride out the adrenaline, even when you know damn well you can’t do any of that.  But you keep yourself moving, and think.

The worst part, when you get right down to it, is that you already knew this was going to happen.  There was no other option, and you still blindly, willingly put yourself into this situation like a goddamn idiot.  Catherine warned you at Lambda about what the brain scans really do, and you’ve technically done this once already.  You’ve seen enough pitifully confused Mockingbirds and comatose humans to know that a brain scan isn’t a _transfer_ of a brain--- it’s a _copy._

Brain scans are exactly what they sound like: a scan of a living human brain.  You underwent one for Munshi back in 2015, had a scan made of your broken brain in the weak hope of finding a treatment, and even then you knew it was just going to be a copy, a diagnostic tool to run through computer simulators without risking the real thing.  Catherine has improved the process significantly since Munshi’s experiment a hundred years ago, has it down to a perfect science, but the idea is basically the same.

There’s no coin toss, no chance of a different outcome.  There was always going to be two Simons at the other side of that brain scan, and you were always going to be the Simon that couldn’t go down in the Climber.

You were always going to be the Simon that got left behind.

Was this part of Catherine’s plan?  To leave a copy of you stranded up at Omicron while she and the Other You went onto the ARK?  Was it her fucking plan to leave you all alone down here, with _nothing?_

. . . Or was this Other You’s plan?  Does the Other You even know you’re still active?  You don’t know how long you’ve been here, exactly, but it must’ve been long enough for Other You to leave with Catherine, maybe even long enough for them to drop the 4000 meters down to the Space Gun and launch the ARK.  It’s not like there’s any way to know for sure; there’s no way to communicate between the sites right now.  Did he leave you here to die, or did he leave you here because he thought you were already dead?

All around you it’s quiet quiet quiet, and the force of it penetrates through the calamity of your thoughts like a javelin. _Did the Other You think you were already dead when he left?_

Maybe the Other You just doesn’t know.  It’s not like Catherine _had_ to tell him, and it’s exactly the kind of deception Catherine is capable of.  All throughout your scavenger hunt for the parts to make your new body she talked about _transferring_ your brain into the power suit, not copying it, as if by using only that word she could just trick you into accepting the false truth and _she was fucking right_ \--- you swallowed that falsehood hook, line, and sinker.  It would be so much easier to get the Other You moving towards the goal if he wasn’t stuck arguing with his copied self about who the Real Simon is.  Why would the Other You need to know?  All Catherine had to do was turn you off for a while, and Other You would never be the wiser.  So easy, so tidy, so fucking _Catherine_.

But why. . .

The silence of the room presses in like a weight, the reality of your isolation a physical pain like nothing you can describe.  You swallow, but is the noise you hear real, or just your brain supplying the sound you think should be there?  Suddenly anxious, you blurt out, “But why let me wake up at all?”

If Catherine turned you off to deceive the Other You, why not just . . . keep you off?  Why let you experience the agony of knowing you’re abandoned on a dead planet, trapped in a room you cannot leave with nothing but yourself for company?  What sick reason could there possibly be for her to do that?

 _  
_ “What am I supposed to do now?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	3. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon only has so many resources at his disposal, and one crucial decision to make.

Computer memory is not the same as brain memory.  Computers are built to retain all input, to be able to store and recall every piece of information in its entirety and without defect.  To delete anything from storage requires external manipulation, but even then, that data continues to exist somewhere in the computer’s history

 

Human brains are not built like that; the ability to edit out unneeded or irrelevant information is the key to mental stability.  If a human couldn’t forget anything that ever happened to them, they would have no time or space to think about anything else, and would drive themselves insane.

 

You are a computer brain that thinks it’s still human, and you are completely unprepared for your alien eidetic memory.

 

Sitting in the dark of the launch dome, you are consumed with the events of your past.  You are watching the pristine, realtime movie of your entire journey thus far, from the Pilot seat at Upsilon you woke up in, to the Pilot Seat at Phi where you operated the Omega Space Gun just moments before.  Or at least, you think it was moments before.  The problem with sudden perfect memory is that you cannot focus on anything past that memory, and the real world becomes an entirely separate reality from you.  It ceases to exist while you examine the past, and only sometimes comes back into vivid focus, like fast-forwarding through the commercials.  Or time traveling to the future.

 

Reality exists in bits and bursts: you’re sitting in Phi, then you’re crawling through Theta, then back to Phi, then escaping Lambda, then off to explore Delta, then Upsilon and Omicron, until you’re back in Phi again.  Each foray into the past is so immersive that you can hardly tell what’s happening in the present tense--- you feel as if you are experiencing each event as it happens, as if you’re doing it all over again for the first time.  You relive the overheated glitching the Fleshers at CURIE caused you, you recall the metallic disgust you felt upon finding the eyeballs at the Delta control room.  You hear the scream of the Proxies at Theta as if they are right there in the launch dome with you, as if you haven’t escaped them after all.

 

All of PATHOS-II is locked inside your head, and you don’t know how to get it out.

 

This wasn’t a problem when you were running full tilt through the PATHOS-II sites trying to get to the ARK.  There was too much going on, so many other things to hold your attention that you had no chance to get bogged down by your sponge-brain.  Besides, navigating underwater research facilities is much easier with a photographic memory, so you weren’t really in a position to complain.  And of course when things got a little slower, there was always Catherine around to keep you engaged with your goals and the task at hand.  Now, sitting alone in a darkened launch room, with the tyranny of the ocean holding you down, you have nothing to keep your mind in check.  Catherine is gone and you are lost.

 

There is no such thing as time down here, and so when you finally break through the swamp of you memory it has been both mere seconds and everlasting centuries since the ARK left you behind.  Phi’s launch room is blacked out, all systems offline and nonresponsive.  With the dark and the stillness of your own body, it would be easy to think the ocean were equally quiet, but that is wrong: water currents smash against the curve of the launch dome, roaring like a beast, and the noise keeps you locked in the present.  And now you have something else to think about.

 

Immediate problems include: Catherine’s chip damage, the lack of power in the launch room, and the accessibility of Phi.  You might be able to use the launch room hatch to get back inside the main building, but that depends entirely on the energy level of Phi and whether the Omnitool is still functional enough to operate the door mechanism.  If it isn’t, you are effectively locked out of all of PATHOS-II.

 

The Omnitool screen is black and it hasn’t done anything since Catherine cut out.  You are afraid to touch it.  But you need to touch it.  But.  You are afraid.

 

It is seconds and centuries later that you pick up the Omnitool.

 

It doesn’t disengage easily, and there is a terrifying moment where some piece of hardware snags, and you see the edge of Catherine’s Cortex chip move dangerously in the slot.  You’re not a surgeon but you sure as fuck feel like one as you ever-so-carefully tease the Omnitool free from the port, worried at every subtle twist that the whole thing will just crumble apart in your hands.

 

You are lucky, finally: the Omnitool comes away free and in one piece.  Upon inspection it seems that part of the adaptor has burnt out, but there’s nothing you can see to suggest that the chips are irreparably damaged.

 

You tap lightly along the side of the Omnitool, push some buttons, secure both chips in their slots.  At first you think you’ve done the absolute worst thing and ruined it further, but then the Omnitool screen flickers and puts off a weak light.  You can barely read the BATTERY LOW warning, but you’ll take what you can get, and already you’re in better shape than you were a moment ago.   Time to see if your hope is deserved.

 

When you used the Pilot Seat before, it was operational enough to separate out all the computers and HUD from the chair so that you could get in and out easily.  Right now it’s pretty damn immobile, so you have to clamber gracelessly over the computer consoles, and you just barely manage to land on the platform instead of the side railing or, worse, fall all the way down to the launch room floor.  Then you go down the stairs and the scaffolding to the main door, where the lock panel is.  Miraculously, it is intact, though barely lit.  You wave your Omnitool over the scanner, and wait.

 

The screen doesn’t respond, doesn’t respond--- then lights up with ACCESS GRANTED and the lock mechanisms inside the door rumble as they release to let the door swing open on its hinges.  Hope: deserved.  You step into the pressure chamber and swipe the Omnitool through the system panel.  More slow-to-respond screens that eventually grant you access, and then the airlock stabilizing process starts up.  Red lights flash, the siren blares, and the room locks and drains out the water.  Then, seconds and centuries later, the door to Phi proper opens.

 

It looks exactly the same as when you left it.  The lights are on, the computers running, the one chair overturned on the other side of the center table.  Across the way you see the hallway leading out to the ocean exit, and to the left there’s the door leading to the ladder for downstairs access.  The room is suffocatingly quiet.

 

You take the Omnitool to the main terminal and try to plug it in.  The port won’t accept the Omnitool, and the screen even flashes a ERROR: UNKNOWN PORT CONTACT to make sure you know you're fucked.  You have to put the Omnitool down on the center table before you do something really stupid.  Like crush the Omnitool in your fist.

 

It would kill Catherine, to do that.

 

You stare at the busted Omnitool in front of you, and think about killing Catherine.

 

You know you’re not going to do it.  You couldn’t do it to your copy-self at Omicron, and you sure as hell can’t do it to Catherine now.  It’s not really her fault that you’re in this mess; it was your own blind avoidance that got you stranded down here, and you’re just going to have to make your fucking peace with that.  Catherine did everything she could to ensure the launch of the ARK, was even willing to come down in your place if you balked, and if her success meant downplaying the truth of the final outcome to you, well, you can’t say you’re surprised.  Betrayed, hurt, and furious, sure--- but not surprised.

 

The more pressing issue is whether you can bring Catherine _back._   Because it’s all well and good to decide not to kill someone, but if they’re just stuck in an isolated square of circuits, unable to connect with or experience the world, they’re basically dead anyway.  You can’t just leave Catherine to waste away in a goddamn pocket computer without doing something about it.

 

Except--- you left your copy-self back at Omicron.  You left him sleeping in the Pilot Seat, a sitting duck in a building full of monsters, completely unprotected.  Didn’t think too hard about leaving _him_ behind, did you.  Your track record for helping the helpless isn’t looking too good.

 

A quick survey of the room tells you that there are no other Omnitools in sight, but that doesn't mean much.  There could be spare Omnitools downstairs, or even back at Tau.  It’s entirely possible that you could simply swap Catherine between Omnitools and she’d be just fine, providing you can find one.

 

Decision made, you go to the ladder and descend.  Unlike above, these rooms are almost all darkened, with only the dim red lights around the seams of the rooms and doors to guide you.  You use your helmet flashlight to comb each of the lower rooms for any sign of an Omnitool; you go through the storage boxes and even look inside the half-built satellite shuttles, as if someone was crazy enough to drop a very expensive pocket computer into any random place.

 

Basically you’re just killing time, because you know your best bet is to search the dead body in the loading room, but you can’t--- you don’t like looking at Catherine’s corpse, okay?  You’d rather hold that off until absolutely necessary.

 

When there’s nowhere left to look and you can’t logic your way into stalling further, you go to the loading room.  The lights are still on because the lone working battery pack for Phi is still hooked up to the power panel, and it gives you a clear view of exactly where Catherine died.  You can see the blood trail and the splatter and the footprints; you can see the wrench that collided with her skull and the bits of bone and brain that broke on impact.

 

You told Catherine that she died in an accident.  That her death was unintentional, that her colleagues didn’t mean for it to happen.  That there had just been a disagreement that got out of hand.  The ARK team didn’t want to launch the ARK and Catherine wanted to launch it anyway, and there was a mishap when they tried to stop her.

 

But it’s pretty fucking hard to “unintentionally” bash someone’s brain in enough times to make a slurry of grey matter and blood in the soup bowl of their skull.

 

The Catherine you know is just a brain copy loaded into a Cortex chip; she can’t see the world like you can.  Using the PATHOS-II system she can hear through the intercoms and track movement on the digital maps, but most of the physical world is out of her reach.  She never saw this body, wouldn’t even know it was there if you hadn’t blurted out your shock like an idiot.

 

Looking at her now, you can’t help but think that the delayed decomposition is a mixed blessing.  On the one hand, at least she doesn’t look like a wizened corpse the way the Theta crew had, which is a nice, non-creepy change; on the other hand, you are able to see the delicate structure of her face and how she looked when she was a real human and how that’s all been mangled from her death-by-friend, and it’s doing nasty things to your conscience.

 

You’re here for a reason, though, so you force yourself to actually enter the room and approach Catherine.  You don’t want to move her, but you need to check the holster at her right hip, which happens to be turned slightly under her.  Can you . . . are you allowed to move her?  It’s not desecration if she’s not actually in her grave, right?  You crouch down next to her, hands hovering over her body.  C’mon, Simon, you can do this.

 

With a careful grip you lift her slowly up and off the floor.  Rigor Mortis has come and gone, and her body slumps like a thawed turkey over your hands, parts of her suit sticking to the long-dried blood that pooled under her.  Inside her holster is a pristine Omnitool.

 

You shift your grip enough to carry Catherine’s dead weight on one hand while your other snatches the Omnitool.  Once you’ve got it free, you drop Catherine and jump away from her body, banging into a drop-down loading mechanism in your haste to get some space between you and her.  The sound echoes loudly in the empty room, and if you had a heartbeat it would be thundering in your ears.

 

“Jesus Christ,” you say on a shaky exhale, your corpse-body jittering like you’ve got hypothermia, like you’ve seen a ghost.  “Don’t make me do that again.”

 

Catherine doesn’t say anything.  Clutching the Omnitool to your chest, you edge around her, giving her a wide berth as you exit the room and hurry back upstairs.

 

Up in the control room you take Catherine’s Omnitool and jack it into the main console port.  The screen lights up and a loading bar appears.  After the loading bar fills, the weak, glitchy voice of Helper Jane says, “Omnitool uploaded to Phi m-ma-main console.  Omnitool updates required.  Tool ch-chip updates required.  No Cortex chip det-te-tected.  Please u-uh-update Omnitool and Tool chip at s-se-service station 4.”

 

“Where is service station 4?” you ask, and hope it's not too far.

 

“Service station 4 is l-lo-located in Phi Main Contro-o-ol room.”

 

So it has to be around here somewhere.  You hunt around the room for a console that looks like a service station, and of course it’s the obvious, yellow painted terminal directly behind you, because sometimes things are just that stupidly easy.  The Omnitool docks cleanly, the loading bar appears again, and the same voice chimes, “Omnitool uh-uh-uploaded to Phi service sta-a-ation 4. Omnitool upd-da-dates required.  T-to-tool chip updates required.”

 

A menu appears on the screen, and you click through it until you get to the Omnitool Chip managers, and start updating the Tool chip and Omnitool.  While the updates are running, you stand back and set out your port-dead Omnitool on the center table.  You know what you have to do, but removing Catherine’s brain from the Omnitool feels eerily close to removing her brain from her body, and the last person to do that killed her.

 

This isn't a death, you remind yourself. It's more like a brain transplant--- it's what your body switching at Omicron was supposed to be.  But this time you’ll _actually_ transplant a brain, instead of just making a fucking copy that has to be left behind while the new copy must continue its mission, with both copies knowing that they’re stuck forever in this apocalyptic hellscape.

 

. . . Okay, so maybe you haven't quite made you peace with that particular betrayal, but it's a work in progress.

 

Back to the problem at hand: Catherine’s Cortex chip.  It doesn't look stuck or broken, so you could conceivably just pull it out.  And that's exactly what you do, with perfect success.

 

“Well that’s was easy,” you say aloud.  You stare at the innocuous chip in your hand.  “Is this a trap? This feels like a trap.”

 

The Cortex chip looks fine, and even the Tool chip is okay when you remove it for comparison.  Why did the short out happen, then? Why would the adaptor get fried and nothing else?  Why didn't you study electrical engineering in college instead of dropping out?  All these questions to be asked, and not an answer to be found.

 

The service station behind you beeps to signal the end of the Omnitool updates.  Looking over them, you realize you were right about this whole thing being too easy--- Catherine Prime’s Omnitool can't hold a charge, and while the service station is trying to power it back up, it's going so slowly that you're pretty sure the battery is a lost cause.  This might not be a problem if you knew how to change the batteries, since you have a perfectly good one in you own Omnitool, but seeing as you're not a technological genius from the 22nd century, you're officially up shit creek without a paddle.

 

What you need is another Omnitool, which you’d probably be able to find at Tau, since that's where the majority of the staff lived and died.  It's also where the creepy Power Suit Monster is, and you only barely escaped being killed by it the first time; you doubt you could avoid it and search all of Tau for a working Omnitool at the same time.  There's also the very real possibility of both Omnitools dying on you before you even make it to Tau’s locked doors.

 

And then of course there’s the actual path to Tau, which is best taken through the cargo delivery tunnel.  A tunnel that was barricade so thoroughly that you had to opt for a side tunnel that lead you right into site Alpha and home of the WAU heart.  The very last place you want to return to.

 

You can’t fix Catherine at Phi.  But if you can’t leave Phi, then you can’t fix Catherine, and if you can’t fix Catherine then you have to stay here, alone, forever.

 

Shit.

 

“Hey, uh, Helper Jane,” you say to the service station, “is there anything here to help fix an Omnitool, or instructions or something?  A battery maybe?”

 

“Omnitool rep-pa-pairs can be d-du-done at Tau. Om-m-mnitool instructions not found. Battery l-lo-located in Loading R-ro-room.”

 

The loading room? That’s not a tiny, handheld-computer battery, that’s a crazy powerful lithium-sulfur battery pack like the one you found at Omicron, big enough to power the site rooms and the power suit. There’s no way you could fit that---

 

Wait.   _Omicron.  Power suit._

 

You know how to fix Catherine.

 

It's not that crazy an idea, when compared to all the other stupid shit you've tried.  Besides, you've even done this once before, when you put together the body you're in now, so you know how to make it work.  All the ingredients are here: Cortex chip, robot parts, battery, power suit, structure gel.  There’s even a dead body already in the suit, just like at Omicron.  Getting ahold of enough structure gel might pose a problem, but all the sites are loaded with the stuff, and there was even that glowing power bulb downstairs that started leaking after you drained it for energy.  If push comes to shove, you could just break a wall to get at the structural pipes.  You've got everything you need to bring back Catherine right here in Phi.

  
“One brain transplant coming right up, Cath,” you say, and get to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	4. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon channels his inner Dr. Frankenstein.

First things first: structure gel.  You're going to need a lot of it, enough to completely saturate a decomposing human body at minimum, but more is better.  The biggest source at your disposal is the huge growth downstairs, so that's where you go.

 

In the corner of the room with the conveyor belt, there is a mass of black viscous gel coating the wall and floor like a mold.  Some of the clear, faceted bulbs that litter the body of it like eyes have stopped glowing but there are a few that still give off a pale blue light.  The center bulb that you drained is unresponsive, but the once-rigid muck around it has started to slough away like mud in the rain, puddles of it having formed on the floor below it.

 

You take a bucket you find after a quick search of the storage room and set it beside the puddles.  Getting the gel into the bucket is  a challenge.  Just scooping it up with your hands is hilariously ineffective and all it gets you is a suit coated in gunk, so you need some kind of scraping tool.

 

Nothing around is really designed for the task, but you do manage to yank loose a panel of metal from the broken tech scattered around, and you use the edge of your palm to guide the gel onto the metal panel like a dustbin.

 

It’s a technique that, while effective, doesn't actually provide enough gel to fill even a quarter of the bucket.  You collect up as much of the floor gel as you can, and then regard the more rigid formations on the wall.  You know they haven't hardened completely yet--- there's still a small electrical current in the gel, and the leaking hasn't stopped, which is good.  On a hunch you take the metal panel and stab it into the largest bulb.

 

Your arm game is strong, so you only have to stab it once to puncture the outer shell.  It's got the consistency of a football skin and pops with about the same force. Except instead of air, the punctured bulb hemorrhages structure gel, black liquid gushing out like arterial spray.  You shove the bucket under the opening and tilt it to catch as much gel as possible.  The bucket is well past halfway full before the flow even begins to petter off.  Good; because even if your giant bucket full of gel isn’t enough to fill in the suit, you know that this cluster of bulbs will have enough to fill in the gaps.

 

You take the bucket upstairs, because once you remove the battery from the loading room there won't be any light downstairs to work from, and you'd like to be able to see what your doing when reviving a dead friend, thanks.  Climbing a ladder with an incredibly heavy, sloshing bucket is so goddamn awkward, but by sheer luck and some damn good reflexes you manage to get upstairs without ruining anything.

 

With both the bucket of gel and the Cortex chip on the table and taken care of, the next task is to find some robot parts.

 

Not just _any_ robot parts, though. What you need is the weird camera-speaker combo that seems to be in all the Helper bots no matter what the size or function.  Catherine used a bunch of nonsense words to describe it (“standard Data Reader” and “Occu-Torch”) but it just looks like the creepy underbuild of a Furby to you.  You need it to hold the Cortex Chip and interface between the brain scan and the physical body, though, so finding one is kind of really fucking necessary.

 

According to the map you accessed way back when you first entered Phi, there are a series of rooms branching out from that entry hallway upstairs that you haven’t explored yet.  It’s possible that there are Universal Helpers just sitting around behind those doors, since that’s been true of basically every other PATHOS-II site so far.

 

Lo and behold, the pattern holds: past the first door there’s just a hallway, but it leads to three rooms, two of which are lousy with pressure-resistant UH bots.  You find one with it’s hood up, robot parts bare to the world, and you carefully detach it’s Furby-face from the rest of the bot.  It has a Cortex chip in it already, but you take it out to free up the port.  You also find some bundled up cables, the kind that are segmented enough to bend into knots, but strong enough to be useful at the bottom of the ocean.  You take both items with you.

 

Back in the main room, you set the robo-face and cable on the table beside Catherine’s Cortex chip.  Since you have to get the battery last, the only other item you need is the suit, which requires some . . . preparations.

 

You go downstairs and stand at the threshold of the loading room again.  Catherine is exactly where you left her.  It hadn’t mattered before, but you’re glad now that she was trying to launch the ARK when she died: it means that her power suit is on and her helmet nearby, since she was clearly planning to go out into the water-filled launch dome.  Her body is mostly intact, with no tears or holes in the power suit.  You couldn’t have asked for a better scenario.

 

There is just one, tiny problem.

 

In Theta, there was a scanning apparatus that Catherine used to examine your previous body, to see how it worked.  That's where you first discovered you were a glorified zombie--- a conscious mind operating a dead body.  In that case, the dead body belonged to Imogen Reed, a metatronics engineer for PATHOS-II and (supposedly) Catherine’s friend.  You got to see the scanned pictures of your body, the places full of structure gel and lit up by your battery, the point of contact between the robot parts and the spinal cord--- the mostly empty diving suit helmet full of only the robot face and Cortex chip and nothing else.  The same held true for Raleigh Herber, whose entire head exploded when the WAU overloaded her Blackbox.

 

That’s the reason you can see and speak out of your head-area without having to contend with the remnants of someone else’s skeleton.  It’s just your robot bits in that space, and maybe some excess structure gel.  You’re not sure how Imogen Reed lost her head, but you do know that Catherine, despite most of her brain splattered on the floor, has not quite lost her’s, and that’s going to be a problem for you.

 

Because even though Catherine already had one blunt force trauma to the head, you have to give her a proper post-mortem decapitation.

 

Just moving Catherine’s body to get the Omnitool gave you pause, and now here you are, seriously plotting out how you’re going to get her head separated from her body, it’s--- it’s too much, and you find that you can’t actually move into the room.  Dead or not, that’s some fucked up shit, and you know it.  That’s your _friend_ in there, and you have to _cut off her head_.  It doesn’t matter that you didn’t know the human version of her, since the version that lived past that initial scan was killed ages ago trying to launch the ARK, but she’s still _Catherine_.

 

When you boil it all down, the true fact of the matter is you can’t bring Catherine back if you don’t do this.  And when you put it that way, you don’t have any other option.

 

There’s nothing in any of the rooms that lends itself to cutting off a head--- where are all the medieval axes and longswords when you need them?--- but you’re nothing if not an improvisor, so you salvage a long jagged piece of metal from the half-built tech in the surrounding rooms to repurpose for the task.

 

You take the metal piece back to the loading room and stand just off to the side of Catherine’s head.  You lift the metal above your head, and line up your shot like you’re playing whack-a-mole to win.  It's just a game, just a game.  You keep your eyes on the space of neck between the seal of the power suit and the edge of her jaw.  You bring the metal down with perfect aim.

 

Decomposition is clearly on your side, but even the decayed and weakened state of the body isn’t enough to make the break instantly clean.  The metal manages to cut through the top layer of skin and flesh, but gets caught on bone and the thick muscles around the esophagus.  You have to slash at it again and again with the metal to get between the bone links, and then you’re just hitting the floor.  Once you confirm that the head is unattached, you have to abruptly look away from what you’ve just done while your body flips the fuck out.

 

You human brain tells you to throw up, but there are no structures left in your robot-corpse body that align with the corresponding physical movements.  Caught in a weird limbo of expected outcomes and reality, you end up feeling like you’re trying to vomit without a mouth.  It’s not pleasant, but it can’t be as unpleasant as having your head cut off, so you figure it’s only fair.  You steel yourself, and turn back to the body.

 

It’s not a perfect separation--- strings of meat and nerve hang out of the neck still in the suit, and there’s a slow drain of bodily fluids leaking from pretty much everywhere.  You toss the metal aside and shake your hands out, pace away and back as you psyche yourself up for the next step.

 

“C’mon, c’mon, you can do this,” you mutter to yourself.  “You can do this, Catherine needs you to do this.”

 

Okay.  Time to take the body upstairs.

 

You flounder a bit on how to start, before finally just grabbing Catherine’s ankles and dragging her to the ladder.  She’s heavy, maybe the same weight of the ARK, and you kind of wish there was a mini-freight elevator around here like there was at Tau, just to make this next part easier.

 

Once you’re at the ladder, you leave the body and climb up solo.  From there you grab the cable from the main room and weave one end through the metal piping that surrounds the ladder hatch, and toss most of the remaining cable down to where the body is.  You tie your end to the piping in the hallway, and then climb back down.

 

There’s enough cable to wrap around Catherine twice over, allowing you to weave it around her chest like a harness for extra security.  You prop her up as best you can against the stairs, and then you go back up again, and untie the cable.  And then you pull.

 

“Reeeeeally wish there was an elevator right now,” you grunt.  The leverage system you set up is making it easier to haul a human up a narrow tube, but she’s still a full grown woman in a specialized power suit.  It takes some serious strength to get her all the way to the top, and you are so damn lucky that the knots hold.  You tie off and drag Catherine over the opening and onto the hallway floor.  After unraveling the cable from her, you leave the whole set up alone and just drag Catherine the rest of the way into the main control room.

 

In order for this to work you need access to the battery port, which is inside the back of the suit.  The suit at Omicron had been opened for you, but you remember the instructions for the power suit you found in the Dive room, so you know that the seal at the neck will grant you access.  You lay her out flat and then pull down the back flap of the suit to reveal the battery port.

 

Another trip down to grab the new battery pack and her power suit helmet from the loading room, and then you’ve got everything you need.

 

When you did this at Omicron, Catherine gave you a very specific order for assembling your body, and you adhere to that order now.  You replace the internal battery with the new one and reseal the suit, then get the body seated upright against the wall.  Next is the robo-face (sans Cortex chip), which you insert into the meat and bone of Catherine’s spine--- making sure that the eyes are pointed in the correct direction after your _second_ try, because you’re nervous and also an idiot.

 

Then you get the bucket of structure gel and very, _very_ carefully pour the gel onto her neck stump; you wait for the gel to seep into the flesh before pouring some more, and you keep going like that until the excess has piled on top of her neck instead of sinking in.

 

After that it’s just a matter of plugging in Catherine’s Cortex chip and attaching the helmet.  And then you’re done.

 

Nothing happens.

 

Nothing happens, and you are panicking, you are lurching forward to shake her unmoving shoulders because this can’t be it, she has to come back, _you’re supposed to save her---_

 

Nothing happens, and then her head twitches, and twin red lights appear in the empty interior of the helmet, and she shouts, “--- _fucking_ idiot!  This is not---!”

 

She cuts off abruptly, her whole body flinching and clattering against the console.  A raspy breathing, fast and shallow, starts to emanate from the suit, and you can see the silhouette of the robo-face move inside the helmet.  Then those red lights point at you.

 

“Simon?  Wh-what?”

 

You laugh, breathless.  “Hey Catherine.  Welcome back.”

 

“ _No_ ,” says Catherine.

 

Her panic is like a sucker punch and you jerk away at her vehemence.  “Catherine, what---”

  
“No, this isn’t right, this is--- Simon, _what did you do?_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	5. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon keeps learning that the WAU is inscrutable, whether he likes it or not.

It takes you a frankly embarrassing amount of time to realize that the structure gel infections have gotten into the Dive Room.

 

When you saw it before the scan, the Dive Room was almost completely uninfected--- all the dingy, grey walls were solid and boring, mostly-hidden by the poor lighting--- but now that’s not true.  In the alcove housing the Pilot Seat, behind the chair proper, is a clutter of glowing gel spores spider-webbing into the concrete and exposed cables.  Now that you notice it, the overhead lights closest to the pilot seat are casting a stronger glow, and the clear bulbs sprouting from the gel growths are a solid blue, as if they’re flush with energy.

 

For some reason, there is a lot of electricity build-up happening behind the Pilot Seat.  You don’t know why, but you’d bet cold hard cash (is paper money still a thing in the future?) that the WAU has something to do with it.

 

This knowledge is not especially comforting.  The WArden Unit is the Artificial Intelligence program that runs all the sites for PATHOS-II, tasked with keeping all the employees alive and safe (for certain values of “alive” and “safe”) and has been the driving force behind almost every bad thing that’s happened to you.  (If you really wanted to give Other You and Catherine a break, you might go so far as to say the WAU caused that betrayal, too, but you don’t want to deprive them of due credit.)

 

From what you’ve learned in your travels, the WAU has been utilizing the structure gel to take over the people and the robots and the wildlife in order to follow its protocol, and in doing so has created monsters like Ackers, who tore out his own eyes before mutating and infesting site Theta with a massive, semi-organic life support system that he forcibly plugged every human into.  The WAU made monsters like the Fleshers and Robot Girl, all of whom are so saturated in electromagnetism and structure gel that they’ve ceased to be human at all, and instead roam around like hyperaggressive bear traps.  The WAU made the Proxies and the Mockingbirds and all those glowing, aggressive fish.  And, if you were in a mood to be fair, you’d say the WAU made you.

 

You are not in the mood to be fair.

 

“What is this bullshit.  Seriously, can nothing just be normal?” you say to the empty room.  All your major instincts get flipped on their head when presented with WAU-infected structure gel, so despite the obviously dangerous appearance of electrified gel, you step as close as you can to the growth and inspect it.

 

The thing is, if structure gel has leaked into here, a place it hadn’t been before, then it only makes sense that the WAU has gotten stronger.  But the WAU needs electricity to stay functional, and you don’t know where it’s getting the extra juice from; site Upsilon was the main power producer, and while there were generators outside Omicron, almost all of those were non-operational.  And yet there’s clearly been a surge in power just within the Dive Room, the least WAU-important room in Omicron--- so what’s the deal?  Where is this extra power coming from?

 

Okay, recon time.  You duck out of the Pilot Seat alcove and go over to the main computer terminal.  All of the screens are still glowing, the numbers and manifests still laid out before you.  There are only two screens but a huge bank of buttons and toggles, none of which are labeled.  Most of what you can see doesn’t make any sense to you--- you were never a computer geek, and you know next to nothing about 22nd century tech.  Manipulating the console in front of you is a lot of trial and error.

 

By sheer fucking luck and some experimental button pushing, creative cursing, and patience, you manage to pull up the interactive map screen of the upper level of Omicron.  It’s not exactly what you were looking for, but it’s a start.

 

The first thing you notice is that the Power Room is on lockdown, colored red and angry on the bright screen, with the words SAFE MODE ACTIVATED and ALL SYSTEMS AT LOWEST SETTING appearing when you click the room for more info.  All of the rooms on the third level are flashing the same pop-ups, too; when you check the first and second levels, you find those rooms are also in a safe mode, all entrances locked down.

 

That . . . can’t be good.  Everything was unlocked when you finished exploring earlier; you distinctly remember  _ un _ locking a bunch of rooms using the Containment Room consoles, so that the entire Omicron site was accessible.  Not to mention the fact that, as far as you remember, Omicron wasn’t under the kind of threat to warrant a safe mode activation.  What changed?  Who put everything in safe mode?

 

When you try to prompt an override of the door locks for the Dive Room, you get a popup window in red that reads SAFE MODE ACTIVATED.  PERSONNEL DETECTED.  EMERGENCY SYSTEMS ON.  There is a green dot on the map of the Dive Room and when you hover the cursor over it, the dot labels itself as PERSONNEL DETECTED.  PILOT SEAT: RECENTLY ACTIVE.  The sidebar information tells you that an Omnitool was used at the terminal 74 hours ago, that the Pilot Seat was on standby until 3 hours ago, and was in use by Imogen Reed for the 71 hours prior  There are no other dots on the map.

 

“So I’ve been here for three days,” you say.  “Great.  That’s just--- fucking great.”

 

You can’t say for sure what all this means for a building run by a malignant AI system, but if you were to hazard a guess, you’d have to say that the WAU diverted power resources to the Dive Room specifically because you’re in it.  You’re not sure  _ why _ .  But.  You guess you’re thankful?

 

More importantly, it doesn’t seem as if the site has shut down entirely, just that everything’s been put on a power-saving setting.  The rooms could, theoretically, be unlocked just by deactivating safe mode at the Containment Room console like you did before, or by rebooting the systems from the Power Room.  Or maybe you just need to activate some other site to alert the WAU that the power can come back on, or install a fucking server update.  There could be any number of solutions and you can’t do anything to test them from the goddamn Dive Room.

 

If you could actually leave the room, figuring out what the hell the WAU is doing would be much, much easier.  Unfortunately, Catherine sealed the Dive Room door leading to Omicron when the Robot Girl chased you down the hall just before the scan, and you know the door mechanism is definitely still locked.

 

Your only other option is the door leading to the Climber, which requires an Omnitool to activate the pressure chamber, but since Catherine was your only Omnitool, you can’t escape that way, either.  Even after she’s left, Catherine’s still making your life unnecessarily fucking difficult.

 

Anger isn’t really helpful right now, though, so you keep messing with the computer controls in the hopes that you can prompt some kind of explanation out of the terminal.  You try to open up a different program on the screen but end up just cycling through the map again--- the rooms are still lit red, still warning you about safe mode, blah blah blah--- and that’s when you accidentally click on the Containment Room, which triggers a prompt window containing an extra message: QUARANTINE.

 

That’s the room where you saw that . . .  _ creature _ .  The one that made your brain go static and the ground shake out from under you.  The creature that keeps trying to talk to you through the computers about saving an unknown “them”.  Could the creature be trapped in the Containment Room?  Can anything that’s like the creature  _ really _ be kept securely in quarantine?

 

In the grand scheme of things, saying that the creature might actually be a ghost is not that unbelieveable or important, but the fact that it keeps  _ disappearing  _ when you try to look at it is what makes you doubt it’s physical existence.  Maybe it’s some kind of electromagnetic monster, like the Fleshers from Lambda and the CURIE, the ones that were so saturated in magnetic fields that just looking at them made your vision short out and your brain glitch riotously in your skull.  It felt like they could disappear and reappear at will, too, almost like teleportation, because of the way they fucking with your head.  Is it using science to blast your robot senses with information that makes it seem unreal?  Is the creature just a burst of clotted energy, or is a physical thing that could harm you?

 

Now that you’re thinking of it, you realize that creature hasn’t shown up in the computer yet to talk to you again, which makes you just as uneasy as the sudden appearance of structure gel did.  It’s possible that it really is caught in the Containment Room, but you doubt it.  It’s more likely that the creature has something to do with the WAU.  Is the creature a part of the WAU?  Or was the creature  _ killed  _ by the WAU?

 

“Overzealous AI kills psychotic ghost, news at eleven,” you mumble to yourself, a creeping sense of absurdism breaking through your mental haze of anxiety.  It’s just one more thing to worry about.  First it was just being alone, then it was the WAU, now it’s the creature.  Is this going to be a rock-paper-scissors for what kills you?  Like the sequel to a superhero movie where they add ten extra villains and a new love interest, just to keep people hooked?  A startled laugh escapes you, and you joke, “Oh man, they really should make a movie out of this, people will love it.  My entire life story, told as a summer blockbuster.”

 

Catherine’s absence hits you hardest right then.  Staring blankly at the screen, you go through the logical train of thought that follows from realizing there is no one left on the face of the Earth capable of making a movie let alone watching one, because there’s nothing to snap you out of your mind now; there’s no female voice chiding you over the speakers to get back on track and focused on completing the ARK mission.  It’s just you, standing stock still in front of a futuristic computer terminal, thinking about the futility of cinema in a world with no people.

 

A light flickers in your periphery, and you jolt around.

 

The structure gel that had creeped into the Pilot Seat alcove has grown exponentially--- now there’s a power bulb peeking out from behind the back of the Seat.

 

Power bulbs have been all over PATHOS-II, and so far you haven’t really thought too hard about why.  This was a gross oversight on your part, because clearly there are a lot of questions to be asked about these bulbs, most immediate being:   _ what the hell? _

 

You approach it warily, although the caution is completely unnecessary.  Of all the things lurking in PATHOS-II, the power bulbs are the least dangerous.  For some reason, if you stick your hand in it after being injured, you’ll be healed.  You don’t know why or how, but it’s been true since before you even knew what had happened to you.

 

When you first woke up at Upsilon, you had no idea you were a robot.  Your brain-turned-computer-chip assumed you were exactly the same as you were in 2015 Toronto, so when you looked at your body, you saw normal skin and clothes and proportions.  That first encounter with a power bulb was during this period of ignorance, so what you remember about it is this: seeing a bulb, being drawn to if for no discernable reason, and feeling a jolt of electricity when you poked it with one finger.  Definitely not your brightest moment, but it wasn’t, by itself, all that weird.

 

Now you know better--- you are a robot, you’re kind of an idiot, and all you need to do to fix yourself after an injury is to stick your whole hand into the bulb and soak up electricity.  Honestly, you have no idea how the power transfer works, but it’s a bit like the health sites in video games: whenever you’re dizzy with damage and stumbling around after an attack from a Flesher or Proxy, all you need to do is stick your hand in a power bulb and presto!  You’re healed.

 

Seriously, it makes no goddamn sense, but you’re not in a position to complain.

 

Despite everything you know about the bulbs and the WAU and the status of Omicron’s power, you have an overwhelming urge to stick your hand in the reverse Sarlacc pit that is the power bulb.

 

That’s a terrible idea.

 

It still takes you several long moments to forcibly step backwards and away from the bulb.  One thing you know for sure is that draining a power bulb takes power right out of the surrounding area, i.e., the Dive Room, and you like having a working computer too much to risk losing it.  Even an Omnitool couldn’t help you out of a room with no power source.

 

You need to stay the hell away from the power bulb, but you also want to move towards it, so you compromise by pacing in a loop at the far end of the room, in front of the main entrance.  Exercising is a better use of your time, anyway; it’s good to get the blood pumping, even if it’s just a placebo effect for your Frankenstein body.  It keeps you mentally grounded, anyway, which is all you can really hope for right now.

 

And that’s when you see it.  Right there, next to the power suit instructions and a data tablet, is an Omnitool.

 

A short winded elation hits you, followed by the hard crush of reality: it’s a  _ broken  _ Omnitool, which means you’re still stuck, only now you have the awful pleasure of seeing the light of false hope at the end of a dead end tunnel.  You pick it up anyway, inspecting the unhinged face plate, the empty slots for the Tool chip and Cortex chip, the scuffed edges that suggest it was dropped from a respectable height.  At Upsilon there was a station specifically to fix Omnitools that made your previous one work well enough to get you all the way to Lambda, but whatever Omnitool repair terminal there might be at Omnicron, it definitely isn’t in the Dive room.

 

Sucks that you’re still not a computer geek or a 22nd century guy, because fixing the Omnitool on your own is basically impossible otherwise.  You very nearly chuck it across the room in frustration, but you’re not  _ that  _ stupid; you just shake it angrily and then set it back down on the table.

 

The data tablet might yield better results for you.  It’s battery power is low, but the screen comes to life when you touch it, showing the last file you opened when you inspected it pre-scan.  It’s just a checklist used by the original ARK team before disembarking on the Climber, but you know the tablet has to have more on it, or at least some kind of surface access to the main computer system of Omicron.

 

Messing around with the tablet is easier than messing around with the main terminal had been, and eventually you manage to backtrack on the tablet’s system enough to access previously saved documents and realize that, unfortunately, the tablet isn't connected to the main system.

 

You keep looking through the tablet, though.  A majority of the documents you find are checklists, some of them interesting, most of them not.  There’s also a fair amount of aimless notes from the payload manager Eric Darby, and some saved correspondence between him and other Omicron staff, as well as the Theta payload manager Alice Koster.  It’s sort of like reading a diary but with huge chunks of vital information torn out, which isn’t much different from all the other audio and text records you’ve scavenged out of the PATHOS-II sites, to be honest.

 

At least the topics are a little cheerier: there’s a saved string of IMs between Darby and his buddy Waldeck complaining about a frankly hilarious practical joke involving lobsters and a guy named Golaski, a series of snarky email drafts saved as  _ Things I Can’t Say to Lansky But Waaant To, _ and one folder titled  _ Romcom Is Life _ full of nothing but friendly notes passed between him and Koster.  

 

Mostly you learn a lot about a dead man you’ve never met and nothing at all about how to fix a broken Omnitool.

 

You sigh, setting the tablet aside.  Constructing the body Other You ended up in was easier than trying to repair this damn Omnitool and isn't that just the perfect fucking commentary on your life right now.  A universally useful handheld computer is more challenging to fix than creating a functionally immortal robot body piloted by a dead human brain.  Fucking incredible.

 

You’ve relocated to the desk chair at the main terminal, because robot body or no, you’ve worked too long in the service industry to snub a chance to sit down when you get one.  With your body the way it is, you doubt you’ll ever get sore or tired, but it sure as hell doesn’t stop you from feeling frustrated.  You bring your hands up to rub your face, and remember just in time that you don't have a face anymore--- just a smooth glass visor protecting your robot parts and Cortex chip and the slowly decomposing, decapitated body of Imogen Reed.

 

You stop your hands a foot from your helmet, staring at the black gloves spiderwebbed with glowing structure gel, thinking  _ I don’t have a face I don’t have a face I don’t hAVE A FACE--- _

 

You deliberately place your hands on your knees and lift your eyes until they’re level with the tops of the power suit lockers.  You pretend to take deep breaths. You remember the calming exercises your doctor advised in the aftermath of the car crash, when bright lights still irritated you enough to make blood leak out of your busted skull.  Remember: you're Simon Jarrett.  You're a human trapped in a robot, trapped in a corpse, trapped in an underwater research facility, trapped on a dead planet---

 

. . . Okay, maybe you need to think about something else for a while.

  
The data tablet is well within your reach.  The screen has blacked out, but you know the battery is still charged enough to keep in running for a little while more.  You take it, pull up the files of Darby’s you didn't get to yet, and start reading.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	6. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon and Catherine differ on their perception of what the future holds.

“Simon, what did you do to me?”

 

“I just---” you stop, shake your head.  This is not at all the reaction you were expecting.  “Catherine, I brought you back.  You went dark, you _died_ in the launch dome.  The Omnitools don’t work and you would’ve been gone forever, I had to do something!”

 

“Are we in still at Phi?” asks Catherine sharply.

 

“Yeah, like I said, the Omnitools---”

 

“So the body I’m in,” starts Catherine.  Her breathing shallow and erratic, as if she’s not quite used to the rhythm of it.  “There was only one body in here, Simon.  Only one person.  So am I---?”

 

She doesn’t continue, and you wait an awkward beat before saying, “Yeah, Catherine.  You’re in your original body.  Needed a sound body for a sound mind, remember?  I did it the same way you told me to make my body back at Omicron, right down to the letter.”

 

“That’s,” says Catherine.  She keeps not finishing her sentences, and her panic must be catching, because it gets to you, leaves your gut a roiling ball of ice snakes.  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?  The choice you made without my consent?”

 

You lurch away from her, shocked.  “What are you talking about?  I saved your life!  You would’ve been stuck in there forever, rotting in a computer chip.  Maybe this wasn’t part of your ‘plan’, but I’m not going to apologize for saving you, Cath.”

 

“You didn’t save me!” shouts Catherine, and you’re reminded of the launch dome, right before she shorted out, and you reach out desperately to calm her.  She clumsily knocks your hand aside.  “Don’t you get it?  We can’t die like this!  We’re both immortal now, and it’s going to drive us both insane.  Because we are _trapped_ down here, with nothing to strive for and no reason to keep going.  That’s not what I call ‘saving’ someone.”

 

“That’s not--- it’s not that bad, you’re not giving this enough thought---”

 

“I’ve given this _plenty_ of thought,” snarls Catherine.  “I’ve been thinking about this since I woke up in a Universal Helper at Lambda.  I knew that once the ARK launched there would be a vacuum of purpose, no reason to keep going, and I knew the only way to escape that fate was death.”

 

“So you were planning to die the whole time,” you say, and you--- you’re furious.  You feel like you’re shaking, your brain feels hot; you half expect blood to start leaking into your eyes.  Almost on instinct you make yourself breathe in the doctor-recommended 7-11 pattern, but you’re a robot and she wanted to die and you just _can’t._  “And you were just going to leave me down here alone?  Did you wreck the Omnitool on purpose, or was that just a lucky coincidence?”

 

“That part wasn’t intentional,” says Catherine.  “And I wasn’t going to leave you, Simon.”

 

“It sure as fuck sounds like you were going to leave me,” you say.

 

“I was going to offer to drain your battery,” says Catherine point blank.  You stare.  “I knew I could sabotage the power source for the Pilot Seat, so once you were gone I was just going to . . . stop working.  Neither of us was going to be left behind.”

 

“And you were okay with that?  With killing ourselves?”

 

“I wasn’t thrilled about it, but there’s no better option,” says Catherine.

 

“Yes there is,” you say.

 

“No, there isn’t,” says Catherine.  “You just don’t understand what this means yet, Simon.  Tell me, what are we supposed to do now?  We’re two decomposing bodies run by brain scans of dead people, stuck in a deteriorating building, over 4000 meters below sea level.  What are we supposed to do with ourselves?  What’s left for us to accomplish, what’s left for us to dedicate our time and attention to?  If we’re lucky we’ll just go to go stir-crazy.  If we’re unlucky we’ll go literally crazy, and we’ll just be another pair of monsters roaming PATHOS-II.  Assuming we don’t kill each other first.”

 

“Jesus, Catherine,” you say.

 

“I’m sorry, but that’s just the hand we’ve been dealt.”  Catherine does not sound sorry at all.  “What did you think was going to happen after we launched the ARK?”

 

“I didn’t think about what to do, because I thought we’d be on the ARK, okay?” you snap.  It still hurts to think about, and you clench your fists.  “I thought I’d be up in the stars, not down here!”

 

“We just had this argument!” says Catherine with palpable frustration.  “I keep telling you, _that’s not how it works!”_

 

_“I KNOW!”_

 

Catherine flinches back.  The room rings with the echo of your scream.  You take gulps of air, realizing too late that you don’t need them, that whatever calming effect you’re aiming for won’t work.  You keep breathing anyway, and force yourself to speak your next words calmly.  “I know that’s not how it works.  But I just didn't--- I didn’t want to acknowledge it.  I just wanted to get a happy ending, and being at the bottom of the ocean waiting to die is not it.”

 

“We’re not going to die,” says Catherine.

 

“Look, I’m sorry I yelled, I didn’t---”

 

“No, I’m serious,” says Catherine.  “Simon, we _cannot die_.  Not unless our batteries run out, or our Cortex chips get damaged.  We’re functionally immortal.”

 

“. . . What?”

 

Catherine sighs.  “As it stands, all we need to stay functional in these bodies are: electricity, structure gel, and our Cortex chip.  The bodies we’re in don’t even need to survive.  If it comes to that, we can prepare a different body and just move our Cortex chip and interface mechanisms, and then we’ll just pick up where we left off.  Between the two of us, each helping the other swap bodies, we could do this kind of thing indefinitely.”

 

“So we just . . . keep living?”

 

“Yes.  We won’t get tired, or hungry, or sick.  As long as we recharge our batteries and structure gel when they get low, we will just keep functioning as we are now.  Forever.”

 

“Holy fucking shit,” you say.

 

Immortal.  You’re fucking _immortal_ .  How did you not think of that?  The fact that the body you’re piloting isn't even truly human anymore, let alone yours, never raised a red flag in your mental construction of the future; you just kind of assumed there was an end point to any plans you made.  That your ending would just . . . happen.  Hearing Catherine spell it out for you is like crashing a meteor through your headspace, and you have a rush of vertigo at the realization that _you are going to live forever_.

 

Catherine watches you descend into a mental breakdown impassively.  Then she points at the center table and says, “Are those the Omnitools that don't work?”

 

Blankly, you glance over your shoulder at the table.  You have to metaphorically scrape your imaginary jaw off the floor before you can answer. “Yeah, there's just the two of them.  One has a busted port, the other has a weak battery.”

 

Catherine gets up, and it is far more of a production than you would've expected.  She does it one step at a time: bracing her palms on the floor, curling her legs under herself, lifting up onto her hands and feet, pushing off into an upright position.  It's like a robot testing out its hardware, or a drunkard trying to maintain balance.  She applies the same deliberation to her walk, putting one foot in front of the other in distinct movements, until she's standing at the center table.

 

“Hmm,” says Catherine, picking up each Omnitool in turn.  “A bad port is a little outside my ability with such limited tools, but a battery should be any easy fix.  Did you already apply some structure gel to the battery?”

 

“Uh, what?”

 

“Did you put any structure gel in the battery area to help facilitate an electrical current?”  Catherine turns to look at you.  “You do remember that structure gel was initially meant to help us improve our electronics, right?  It's designed to help extend battery life and speed up mechanical processes.”

 

“Right, function and facilitation.”  The words trigger a memory of you reading the experiment notes of the Omicron researchers who were surprised at how versatile the gel was outside its intended use.  You also recall mending a circuit board using laser-guided structure gel, and feel a wave of intense embarrassment.  “I didn't think to do that.”

 

“You went through all the long, complicated work of creating a humanoid robot, but didn't bother to slap some structure gel on an Omnitool?” Catherine sounds amused for the first time since she woke up, and your feel a mix of relief and resentment at that, because she may be happy, but she's also dragging you pretty bad.  She shakes her head.  “Better late than never, I guess.  Where did you get the structure gel you used for me?”

 

“Downstairs.  There’s a huge growth in one corner, though I drained a lot out of it.”

 

“Not a problem, we only need a little bit, anyway,” says Catherine.  She looks around, and then makes her way slowly towards the hallway leading to the ladder.  You watch her progress from your slumped position on the floor, your mind a buzz of white noise.  Then you get up and follow her.

 

Catherine moves at a pace just shy of newborn-deer-on-ice, and doesn’t get any faster between the ladder and the conveyor belt room.  “Are you okay?  You’re moving kind of . . . odd.”

 

“Up until about five minutes ago I was a non-physical entity without limbs or spacial awareness,” says Catherine, her good humor officially gone.  “I’m not used to the change.”

 

“Oh.”  You shuffle along a half step behind her.  “Do you want any---?”

 

“Simon,” cuts in Catherine.  “I think you’ve done enough.  Just let me do this, okay?”

 

“Right, okay.”

 

Once you’re at the gel growth in the corner, Catherine stops just out of arm's reach of it.  “It looks like it should have a much stronger electrical current through it.  Was there a power outage?”

 

“No, I drained it.”

 

Catherine sighs.  “Structure gel isn’t electricity, Simon.”

 

“No, I mean, I drained it of electricity.  Then I drained it of structure gel.”

 

Twin beams of red light swing around to aim right at you.  “What?”

 

“That’s how I’ve been healing myself,” you explain.  “Every time I get hurt, or run into a WAU monster, I recharge myself using one of these power bulbs.  They all look like that, kind of like mushroom worms, but with spirals of blue light around the mouth that are full of electricity.  After I drain them they go dark.”  Catherine keeps staring at you.  “Sometimes the machines under the gel will lose some power, too.  Or all of their power, depends, sometimes I really need the extra kick.”

 

“Are you telling me,” says Catherine, “that the WAU has built energy ports specifically designed so that you, or someone like you, could recharge their battery?”

 

“I guess?”

 

Catherine keeps staring at you, and it’s throwing you off hard, because you never really thought about how creepy a diver helmet would look without a human face behind it.  In the shadow of the empty space you can see the sharp, narrow outline of her machine parts--- you can see the edges of her speech box and light sockets, and it’s so obvious that she’s wrong, you’re both wrong, and she’s looking at you like she _knows_.  You feel well and truly watched, more so than you did when being hunted by the Proxies, and the comparison is threatening to let your memory bank to swell and drown you.

 

The coming wave is broken by Catherine’s voice, displeased but too busy to give you a full dressing down.  “That would’ve been great to know about before now, Simon.  One issue at a time, though.  Let’s get this Omnitool fixed.”

 

Catherine flips her Omnitool over and fusses with the back panel; once it’s open, she holds the exposed battery under a still-dripping fold of the wall growth.  A glob of gel falls right on the battery, and you watch as a bit of smoke coils up from the gel that has suddenly sprawled out over the surface, lines weaving all over in a web of oil-drawn circuits.  Catherine closes the panel and turns the Omnitool over again.  Where there had been a WARNING: BATTERY LOW screen there is now a FULLY CHARGED screen lighting up the display.

 

“Well that was easy,” you say.

 

“Unfortunately this trick won’t work for the other one,” says Catherine, holstering her Omnitool.  “We’ll have to get a different one for you.”

 

“There aren’t anymore.”

 

“What about at Tau?  That was the main site for the Abyss, they had to have back ups for everything just in case.  They should even have some repair stations,” says Catherine.  “Besides, we can’t stay in Phi forever, there’s just not enough room.”

 

“We can’t go to Tau.  There’s a monster there,” you say.

 

“What kind of monster?” asks Catherine.  “Is it like the Proxies, or the Fleshers?”

 

“I’m not sure,” you admit.  “It was in a power suit, like us, but it’s head was mangled.  It could operate the door locks, even use the pressure chambers.  Definitely infected with structure gel, but no glowing bits, and it didn’t mess with my brain as much as the Fleshers.”

 

Catherine hums thoughtfully. Then she asks, “How did you escape it before?  I assume you found some way to avoid getting killed by it while getting the ARK, or else you wouldn’t be here.”

 

“I got away from all the monsters at the other sites, too, but that doesn’t mean I could do it again,” you say.  “The Robot Girl at Omicron almost tore me apart, and Ackers really did catch me in the Theta labs.  He put me in the same meat cocoon as all the others, but its life support function didn’t work on me because I don't need it, so I was able to get free.”  Catherine goes rigid with her no-doubt scathing questions, but you press on, “The monster at Tau wasn’t like that.  It kept coming at me like it wanted to hurt me, and it’s a fast sonovabitch.”

 

“Did you even _try_ to kill it?” asks Catherine.

 

“With what?  It’s not like this place is overflowing with lethal weapons,” you say, flinging your hands out to showcase the supreme lack of firearms in the vicinity.  “How exactly do you expect me to kill something when my biggest weapon is a chair?”

 

“Okay, okay, I get it,” says Catherine.  She looks around, then says, “There aren’t going to be any lethal weapons anywhere on PATHOS-II, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we could draft into becoming weapons with some creative tweaks.  The stun batons are not strong enough to kill a human, but it could be enough to scare away a WAU creature.”

 

“Great,” you say, “but the only stun baton we had is back at Delta.”

 

“They have them here, too,” says Catherine.  “Or at least, Tau does.  I don’t think Phi has any stored here.”

 

“So we have to go to Tau to get the weapon that will protect us enough to go to Tau?” you say.  “Fucking perfect.”

 

“I know it’s not ideal, but it’s a start.”  Catherine, decision made, heads back to the ladder.  “We just need to avoid the creature long enough to get the baton.  Do you remember the layout of Tau?  The batons should be in main storage, but I have no idea where that’d be.”

 

“Wait a second,” you say, darting forward to walk in front of her.  “How are we supposed to get to Tau?”

 

Catherine is undaunted, and nearly walks right into you before you scramble aside.  “We walk.”

 

“How?”

 

“Through the ocean?” says Catherine as if that should be obvious.  “Or the cargo tunnel, if you prefer.”

 

“There are monsters out there in open water,” you tell her.  “I almost got eaten by a squid monster twice, and I don’t want to give them a third shot.  There are all kinds of WAU infected monsters around, and they’ll attack anything too far from the lights.  Lights that are not completely functional.”

 

“Then we use the cargo tunnel.”

 

Catherine starts climbing the ladder, and you have to shout up at her, “We can’t, there’s too much debris.”

 

“Then how did you get the ARK here?” asks Catherine from above.  She reaches the top and clambers over, and you start ascending.

 

“The debris was low enough for the ARK to use the tunnel,” you say, “but I had to take a side tunnel, and the detour lead to Alpha, and trust me, you do not want to go there.”

 

You’re almost at the top of the ladder, so when Catherine shoots her head over the opening to look down, you nearly clock her in the chin with the crown of your helmet.  “Sorry, sorry, just--- did you say Alpha?  There’s no site called Alpha in PATHOS-II.”

 

“It was a secret site,” you tell her as you climb out.  She shuffles back just enough to let you stand, but close enough to keep you cornered at the end of the hall.  “Only Ross, Sarang, and Dahl knew about it.  The were using it to secretly work on the WAU.”

 

“I want to see it,” says Catherine and no.

 

“No,” you say.  “No way, that place is creepy, the pressure’s so high and it makes me glitch so bad it’s like my head’s going to jump right off my neck.  I can’t.”

 

“You already did,” points out Catherine.  “You did it once, you can do it again.”

 

“No,” you say.

 

“Simon, look,” says Catherine, “we don’t really have a lot of options here.  We either stay in Phi and live out the rest of eternity in a glorified shoe box, or we go to Tau and at least have the chance of making the best of a terrible situation.”

 

In the semi-dark of the hallway, Catherine’s eyes are very bright.  Her new body is bulky and white, like an astronaut suit, and it makes her face silhouette seem absurdly tiny.  But her voice is full and confident, so goddamn sure of herself, bigger than her body could possibly hold.  You’ve followed her this far, haven’t you?  Why not a little further.

 

“Okay,” you say.  “Okay, Cath, we’ll go.”

 

“Great!” says Catherine.  “Thank you so much Simon.  I know this is hard, and it’s a lot to take in so quickly, but I really am glad you’re with me on this.”

 

You can feel your trepidation like a burr in your spine, but before you can say anything Catherine claps her hands.

  
She sounds like she's smiling as she says, “Now, how do we get there?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	7. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon and Catherine head out for site Alpha and Tau.

Having Catherine with you in the meatspace is a novelty, a thing you keep turning to examine like a new toy or a shiny object.  Even when, frankly, you should be paying attention to your surroundings, you keep finding yourself looking back at her.  Part of it is that she hasn't stopped moving weird, and you're starting to think there might be something wrong with her ability to interface with her new body.  But mostly you’re just amazed that there's someone else to interact with now.

 

There’s no way to talk to each other out in the maelstrom of the ocean currents, so you keep communication down to simple hand gestures as you lead her down the path you took from Alpha.  You’re mostly guesstimating the route, since it's hard to retain a perfectly detailed map when your mind is occupied with escaping hungry squid monsters, but your robot memory comes through: after a while you reach the depression in the rocks and bowled out hole that is the Alpha back door.

 

You wave Catherine after you, and start the part-walk, part-slide down the segmented tunnel.  Not even two meters in, you get the scare of a lifetime when Catherine’s voice erupts right next to your ear.

 

“---Think I got it this time. Can you hear me?”

 

“Jesus, Cath, warn a guy,” you say, gasping. You imagine your heart racing in your chest, but wisely don't test that with you hand.  “How are you doing that?”

 

“All suits are built with comm. gear in them, so that we can talk to each other even when we're out in the water,” explains Catherine.  “It’s hard to manipulate tech manually now, after spending so much time doing it with just my brain.  But I finally figured out how to make it work for our suits.”

 

“Thanks,” you say.  “That’ll make it easier to warn each other when shit hits the fan.”

 

“Glad to see your optimism is as strong as ever,” says Catherine. 

 

“Ha ha,” you say, and continue down the tunnel.

 

As you get closer to ground zero, the more you see of the damage caused by the squid monster that chased you away from the WAU.  The tunnel is scraped all to hell, part of the metal segments have been split or unseated, and it makes the trek extra difficult.  It’s also much shorter than you remember, and you end up stepping into the main room before you fully realize it.

 

There's damage from the squid monster here, too: the gel growths along one side of the domed room have been punctured and allowed to drain into the water, causing a weird haze on top of the blur you already experience just by being at this level of pressure.  But besides that (and the hole in the ground the monster entered from), the room is exactly how it looked before, with it’s tangled nest of machinery erupting from walls and computers like a demonic disembowelment.  And at the center of it all is the Heart.

 

It's looks more like a cancerous lung than a heart, to be honest--- all black and lumpy, pieces of it moving with an animal pulse.  It glows, too, that bright blue that all the gel growths put out, the whole mess of it thrumming with electricity.  Being around it sets you on edge, like a magnet too close to a similar pole, and you feel repelled.

 

But you're not glitching at all.  Your vision is relatively fine, and there's no hornet's nest of noise to wreck your concentration. If anything, it feels too quiet in here now, with only your breathing and the Heart’s rhythmic shifting to break the tension.  Maybe the glitching was caused by Ross’ mutations instead, and he was just so saturated in electromagnetism that you couldn't distinguish anything past it.  Come to think of it, he made you glitch every time you encountered him, even through the computers at Omicron.  The Heart seems fairly self contained compared to Ross, which seems . . . odd.

 

“Is this the Heart?” asks Catherine in hushed tones, stepping into the room to stand beside you.  “Is this the WAU?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“It’s bigger than I thought,” she says.  “More substantial.”

 

“What did you think it was going to look like?” you ask.

 

Catherine shrugs.  “A computer.”

 

“You said yourself the WAU was like a cancer,” you remind her.  “And you were exactly right.  Anyway, we should be getting out of here.  The door leading out is on the opposite side of the room.”

 

“Of course it is,” sighs Catherine.

 

You take great care to give the Heart a wide berth as you lead the way to the exit.  There's no Ross around to harangue you about killing the WAU or monsters trying to eat you, but the spectre of a threat doesn't go away.  Though Catherine seems wholly unconcerned, if her casual approach of the Heart’s face is any indication.

 

“Catherine!” you hiss when you notice how close she's gotten to the Heart.  “Get back!”

 

“It looks like that power pod at Phi,” she says thoughtfully, like she didn't even hear you.  “That can't be a coincidence.  What's the benefit of this shape? Why adopt such an easy fault for outside contamination?”

 

“Catherine, now is not the time,” you say, darting forward to grab her arm.  She tries to shake you off absently, but you are having none of it, and drag her back towards the exit.

 

Catherine tries to twist out of your grip.  “Simon, cut it out, this is important!”

 

“We can’t stay here,” you say.  You shove her through the open door.  “You can tell me all your theories later, but right now we just need to get out.”

 

“But the WAU---”

 

“Is dangerous and unpredictable and able to control the animals it infects, and might call in a second guard squid if we don't get out now,” you say, and Catherine echoes, “Guard squid? What---?” but you talk over her, insisting, “Now let's  _ go.” _

 

You keep her in front of you, guiding her through the obstacle course of broken pipes, computer debris, site rubble and boulder-sized structure gel growths that litter the halls of site Alpha.  It's a stop and start affair; some of the original hallways are blocked and others are difficult to navigate through without crashing headfirst into globs of gel, and Catherine still doesn't have a great handle on her dimensions, missing handholds and knocking her helmet on low hanging cables.

 

It's a goddamn relief to find yourself at the front door of site Alpha, and you've never been so happy to see a gel-covered cave in your life.  “The cargo tunnel is right through this rock passage, we’re really close.”

 

“Simon, there is a lot of fully-powered structure gel here,” says Catherine, ignoring you again.  “And I didn't experience any glitch---”

 

“Not now,” you say as you push Catherine along, one hand at her back to keep her from deviating.

 

“Will you stop that?  I'm not a child,” snaps Catherine.  “I'm trying to talk about a real threat to us, and you won't let me get a word in.”

 

“Sorry, I'm just trying to keep us out of danger,” you say.

 

“And I get that, but you can't just ignore me because you think you’re helping,” says Catherine.  “Shocking as it may be to you, I actually know a fair bit about how the WAU is supposed to work.  And that back there is not normal.”

 

“No kidding,” you say.  You sigh.  “Okay, alright. Tell me what you know, but talk and walk, please.”

 

Catherine turns to glare at you over her shoulder, and you’re glad looks can’t kill because otherwise you’d be six feet under by now.  As it is, she just turns back around and stalks ahead of you through the rocky maze.

 

“Well for starters I’d like to know where the WAU is getting its energy from.  It looked like it was anchored to some kind of underground source, but the whole point of Upsilon being on the Plateau instead of the Abyss was because you can’t access the thermal vents from here,” she says.  “How did Upsilon look when you were there last?”

 

“It looked like it was operating at the lowest setting, and it was in bad enough condition that the comm. center flooded while I was still in it,” you say.

 

“If it’s not running at full capacity, then where is the WAU getting all this energy from?” wonders Catherine.  “How can it be influencing so much when structure gel needs an electrical current to keep from hardening?  Is the WAU sourcing power from the auxiliary grid at Omicron, or maybe the back up generators at Tau?  If it’s the second option, we are in serious trouble.”

 

You almost stop dead at that.  “What do you mean?”

 

“The backup generators are limited,” says Catherine, ducking down to start the crawl through the smallest and final stretch of the rock passage.  You follow suit, and listen with mounting anxiety as she says, “At some point, the WAU is going to overdraw and we’ll be stuck without any kind of safety net because nothing will work; either we’ll get trapped outside the buildings or inside them, but it’ll be bad regardless.”

 

You both emerge from the rock path and out into the decrepit cargo tunnel.  The blockage of debris that delayed you the first time hasn’t moved, but it has gotten bigger.  Down the way you can see larger bits of broken concrete on the floor, pieces of pipe and rebar jutting out of the walls and ceiling.  It doesn’t look like any of it has caved in since the launch of the Space Gun, so you both take off down the tunnel at a brisk walk--- or awkward lunge, in the case of Catherine.

 

“So all of this was for nothing?” you ask eventually, after weighing the pros and cons of bringing up her motor challenges instead of the issue of your long-term survival.  “We’re just going from one dead end to the next?”

 

“At least now we know it’s a possibility,” says Catherine.  “From here on we can start planning how to use the resources we have to get back on the Plateau without wasting too much time.”

 

“Hang on,” you say, and you stop in your tracks but Catherine doesn’t.  You’re forced to catch up with her before you can demand, “Your plan is to go back up?”   
  


“Yes, of course.”

 

“ _ How? _  The only things capable of getting us out of here are the Climber and the DUNBAT.  You said yourself the Climber can’t be operated from the Abyss, and the DUNBAT is a Mockingbird that went MIA.  So what are we supposed to do, swim?” you ask.

 

“We’re too heavy to swim, and besides, I don’t know how,” says Catherine, and you blurt,  _ “What?”  _ but she just keeps talking, “No, what we’re going to do is try to get a message up to Omicron, so your other self can operate the Climber.”

 

“My other--- oh.”  An anchor of guilt settles low in your gut.  “Him. . . .  Can he do that?”

 

“Once I give him the passwords and instructions, yes.  It’s a little complicated, and it’s going to be difficult without an Omnitool, but I think it’s possible,” she says, and her tone makes you slightly doubtful of the validity of her statement, but you’re not sure how to argue.  Catherine barrels on with her uneasy confidence.  “Right now our priority is to clear out Tau so we can actually work in peace.”

 

“Yeah, because getting rid of a monster that wants to kill you is the easy part.”

 

“In this case, yes,” says Catherine.  “Getting rid of man-made monsters is statistically easier than trying to overcome the brute force of mother nature.”

 

“That’s not exactly comforting,” you say as you both approach the door to the cargo room at Tau, but you’re suddenly confronted with a much bigger issue: getting inside.  Unfortunately, it seems like the room isn’t meant to be opened from the exterior; there isn’t even an access panel for the Omnitool.  And to add insult to injury, it looks as if the structure gel has made it out of the site and sealed the door shut, because  _ of course _ .

 

Catherine doesn’t go up to the door, though--- she turns off to the left, and stands at the wall of the tunnel with her hands ghosting over the metal.

 

“Uh, Catherine?  What are you doing?”

 

Catherine doesn’t even bother to look away from her scrutiny of the tunnel sides.  “Trying to find the handle for the escape hatch.  All structures have them, in case of emergency, or maintenance.”  She moves her palms over the wall a bit, and then suddenly shoves her hand into a pocket of space you didn’t notice before, and twists.

 

There’s a groan of monumental strain, and then a rectangle of metal sinks away from the tunnel and disappears, revealing a doorway leading into a darkened pressure chamber.  Catherine steps right in, and you have to scramble to keep up.  She swipes her Omnitool over the access panel and then the water drains out and you’re able to leave the chamber for an air-filled, unlit passageway.

 

“This would’ve been nice to know about,” you say, flicking on your headlight to better see where you’re going.  “Might’ve made getting out of Tau much easier.  Had to flood the dive room pressure chamber myself before, and maybe I could’ve even avoided all these structure gel monsters.”

 

“You flooded the chamber manually?” says Catherine.  She’s turned on her headlight, too, and her gaze keeps swinging around as she tries to watch her feet and the path ahead at the same time.  “Then we never even had the option to use the Dive Room entrance, since you went and broke it.  Do you just wreck everything you can find before you leave a place?  This is like the CURIE escape pods all over again.”

 

“Hey, at least I didn’t detonate a nuclear reactor this time,” you joke.

 

“I guess I’ll take what I can get,” says Catherine dryly.

 

Abruptly you reach a ladder.  Catherine climbs laboriously, one limb moving at a time, and it’s so slow that you feel like you’re inviting trouble by dragging it out, but you don’t say anything.  It’s probably really hard to get used to having a body after basically being a circuit board for so long.  You wouldn’t know, but you don’t want to get in another fight right now, so you keep it to yourself.

 

The ladder ends at a closed hatch, but luckily it opens without a problem: Catherine just turns the wheel lock, and the hatch releases.  She pushes it up just a sliver, and looks out; then she lowers it and glances down at you.

 

“Okay, do you remember the layout?”

 

“Sure, kind of.  I didn’t explore everywhere, though, and the room I think we’d find a stun baton in may not have any, so we might have to sneak around a lot,” you say.  “Also, I don’t know where we are in the site, so I’ll need to figure that out first.”

  
“That’s fine.  As long as we find a stun baton before the creature catches us, we’ll be in the clear.”  Catherine looks back up at the hatch.  “Okay, I’m going out.  Follow me quick.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	8. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the one hand, both Simons are having a rough day, but on the other hand . . .

In the course of perusing Darby’s life, you come across an IM with a broken link to what is supposed to be a song or meme or something, and you are reminded all at once of all the things you are never, ever going to get to experience again now that the world is over.

 

You can make your peace with not having a flying car or hoverboards in the future, but what you aren’t prepared to handle is the dawning realization that there are some things you will just never know.  How did all your TV shows end?  What movies came out?  How did your mom die?  Did World War III happen?  What about space travel and the Millennials and pop culture?  What about  _ music? _

 

You spend about ten minutes in a terrible existential panic, thinking about all the music you are never going to hear again.  As someone who spent the better part of their teens and twenties playing every instrument they could get their hands on, you have a lot of songs saved in your bank of Music I Like, and that’s not even counting the songs you’ve memorized for school or Kevin’s cover band or because they just got stuck in your head.  

 

Memories of the first song you played on a piano, of how Kevin lit up when you showed him your attempt at “One Week”, of lugging around that cello in sixth grade--- all those memories compound on each other and push you further and further towards a downward spiral.  It’s easily the shittiest thing to happen to you since you woke up--- seriously, if it weren’t for the betrayal thing, you’d put it at the number one Worst Thing About the Future--- and there’s a moment where you can’t hear a damn thing, because the cacophony of every song you’ve ever heard overlaps so strongly that you end up hearing nothing at all.

 

Ironically, this reminds you of John Cage’s totally silent composition “4’33”, which gets you thinking about other experimental music, which gets you thinking about your own experiments with music, the music you messed up, the misheard lyrics, the memes, the in-jokes.  You’ve got the entire discography of your life at your beck and call, and you use it.

 

You sing.

 

You fill up the Dive Room with emo, punk and pop rock; rhythm and blues; the oldies; country; jazz; rock and roll; and every earworm you’ve ever heard.  You think of the songs you heard on the radio, the songs you played over and over until you got them just right, the songs and dances you, Ashley, and Jesse put together for the Halloween party.  When you don’t remember the words you just make up shit, or skip it, or change songs--- you don’t let yourself stop, because you’re scared of what’ll happen if you do.

 

For a while you’ve got nothing but your voice and your memory, and it is good enough.

 

 

* * *

  
  


It’s surprisingly difficult to be quiet while exiting a floor hatch in bulky power suits, but no sound you make seems to call attention to your location, and you’re able to leave and close the hatch without trouble.  You look around.

 

“I think we’re in the maintenance area, near the front,” you say, taking in the pattern of gel mold on the floor and walls, the blocked off door behind you and the unobstructed three-way hall ahead.  The mental map burned into your electronic brain is painting an optimized route with bright colors in your mind’s eye.  “Good.  This is good.  The room we’re looking for should be down that hallway, first door on the left.”

 

“You’re in the lead,” says Catherine, waving you forward with a flourish.

 

You take care to step quietly around the corner, looking around with your headlight for any signs of the Power Suit monster.  There’s a groan emanating from the structure, but you don’t know if that’s just the site experiencing ocean pressure or if the monster is roaming around.  The lights are out midway through the walk, but that doesn’t matter--- the door to the mechanical room is still active, and you press the button to open it.

 

The door swoops aside, and you and Catherine step into a room filled with half-broken electronics and a operating table still hosting a cannibalized UH bot.  One crooked overhead light bathes the room in a yellow glow, and behind the operating table is the computer screen still open to the site map.  There are shelves lining the walls, all full of boxes and electronics you don’t recognize, except for---

 

“Stun batons,” says Catherine triumphantly.

 

The name is a little misleading: a stun baton is more like a gun than a stick, and to you it looks like a water gun, but with electricity instead of water.  It also happens to be much heavier and much more dangerous, which is exactly what you need from a weapon right now.  There are four more like it on the shelves below, and Catherine examines each of them, testing pieces of the machinery as if looking for something specific.

 

You are more concerned with the doors, one of which is still open; the other, closed door leads to a room that you recall as looking like a gel monster ravaged it in a fit of anger, but should be otherwise empty.  The open door leading to the hallway is a bigger problem, since the monster could just walk in at any moment.

 

“Some of these are completely dead, but a few are in fairly good condition,” says Catherine, turning the last of the stun batons over in her hands.  “We should even be able to modify them to raise the voltage, so we can do maximum damage.”

 

“Great,” you say and you hold out your hand expectantly without looking away from the door.  “Give me one, and then we can start making our way to the living quarters, where we’ll be safer.”

 

“Hold on a sec, I need to find the ones with the most battery,” says Catherine, still fussing with the batons.

 

“We don’t really have time for that, Cath,” you warn her.  You feel a buzz rattle your optics.  “Catherine!”

 

“Just a sec, I’ve almost got---”

 

Three things happen in quick succession.  First your vision glitches, the colors lurching sideways while the shadows tilt away.  Then the closed door leading to the empty room slides open, leaving a clear path between your sudden visitor and Catherine.  And finally, the sudden visitor is revealed as the creepy, gel-filled Power Suit monster.

 

The monster snarls from behind it’s cracked helmet, it’s limbs and body jittering like a busted animatronic.  Your first instinct is to flee--- that’s how you got away from it before, trapping it behind doors as you ran through the site like a rat in a maze.  But that’s not an option anymore, because to leave now would mean sacrificing Catherine, and you simply can’t do that.

 

Catherine has gone stock still, and is just staring at the monster like she’s forgotten how to move all over again  While you know the monster can be slowed down by staring it in the face, you also know that it’s face is just a hollowed out cesspool of structure gel, and no matter how hard you stare, at some point it’s going to stop giving a shit and simply run maw-first at her.

 

Which is exactly what it does.  The monster charges and Catherine doesn’t move, and doesn’t move and doesn’t move--- and you  _ act _ .

 

You sprint forward and shove the monster against a rolling cabinet with all the strength you can muster, and it’s enough to send the thing tumbling head over heels to the ground.  It screams, lashing out at the air and floor---- and then it twists its lower body like it’s made of putty rather than flesh and bone, hauling itself upright in one swift movement.

 

You’re not expecting it, and so when it lunges for you, the most you can do is throw your arms up to block.  The monster grabs your forearm with one hand, its other reaching for your shoulder, and with its tentacle face it catches your left hand and  _ bites _ .

 

“Shit, fuck, let go!” you snarl over the crack of plastic and monstrous shrieking, yanking your other hand free enough to smash your closed fist against its busted helmet.  The monster takes the chance to use both its hands to haul you in closer by your suit, forcing you to twist your arm awkwardly just to keep hitting it.

 

“Gel,” it roars around a mouthful of your hand.  “Gel!”

 

“Fuck you, you fucking zombie, let go!” you shout back, and slam your fist into it’s neck.

 

The monster seizes up, and at first you think it’s your doing, but then you feel the bolt of electricity zip from the monster into you, and you scream.  Your vision whites out and sound becomes the taste of copper in your mouth, a mouth you don’t have but somehow feel as it stretches around a scream you can’t hear yourself make.  You fall back, out of the monster’s grip, and when you blink again the world is back in focus and your body isn’t pretending to be a weather vein anymore.  You gasp, staring up at the ceiling.

 

“Simon?  Simon, are you okay?”  Catherine’s helmet appears over your head, blocking your view.  You imagine that her red light eyes are looking at you with concern.  “Hey, can you hear me?”

 

“What was that?” you ask.

 

“I shot it with a stun baton.”  Catherine hefts it up so you can see it.  There’s a little red light blinking on it, and bits of white electricity spidering around the nozzle.  “Might’ve broken it, but we’ve got back ups.  I don’t know how long it will keep that thing down, so we should hurry up and get out of here.”

 

“Right, lemme just---”  You’re still fuzzy in the brain, so it takes you an extra moment to realize the hand you’re trying to prop yourself up with isn’t there.  Your left hand, which had been perfectly fine a minute ago, now seems to have been gnawed right off your wrist, gove and all.  There’s even some structure gel and clots of organic matter dripping from the wound.  You can’t feel it at all, but your mind is awash with the knowledge that you should be panicking.  “What the fuck.”

 

“Don’t worry, the gel isn’t escaping that fast.  We can find a way to stop up the leak at the infirmary,” says Catherine quickly.  “Or, I guess, we can just patch you here, but I’d rather not.  Here, give me your other hand, I’ll pull you up.”

 

You stare at your ragged, grotesque stump of an arm, your mind a perfect blank, before you offer Catherine your right hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	9. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tau is a graveyard and Catherine wants to read all the tombstones.

Catherine helps you on your feet, and you make your unsteady way back into the hall.

 

Focusing is difficult.  It’s like you’re stuck in the same room as the Fleshers, with your vision flopping the world around at vexing angles, but now you’re not just having trouble moving, you’re having trouble feeling your limbs entirely.  If you weren’t severely lacking the required chemical cocktail of human hormones, you’d think you’d gone into shock.

 

There’s structure gel dribbling out of your arm stump, and your brain keeps sending you conflicting messages about whether you’re feeling pain or not, so you just . . . don’t look at it.  Your mental tenacity is not something you want to depend on right now, so it’s for the best that you don’t think about your lack of hand.  You’re so committed to ignoring your myriad of physical problems that you almost miss the turn for the way out of the laboratory section of Tau.

 

It’s not until you open the door to the passageway that takes you above the main compound and into the separate living quarters that you remember the ladders.  You’ve been holding your busted arm close to your chest and out of sight thus far, and it takes constant effort not to flail it stupidly at the ladder railing as you climb.  Catherine wisely does not say anything.

 

You and Catherine go down the hall to a second ladder, this one broken and leading downward, to the entrance of the living quarters.  And then you’re in the common room.

 

“Um, wait,” you say, stopping at the threshold.  “Maybe you shouldn’t look---”

 

Last time you were here, you took the time to go through all the rooms and datamine each body and read all the notes and listen to all the audio clips, but you didn’t take any time to close the goddamn doors.  So Catherine has a clear view of all the dead, gel-infested, and writhing bodies that occupy the bunk rooms.

 

“Oh my god,” cuts in Catherine faintly.  “Are they  _ moving?” _

 

“Only the ones with structure gel in them,” you assure her.  “I think they tried to eat it once the food ran out, like Ackers did.  They aren’t dangerous, though.”

 

Hearing it out loud, you realize none of that is actually reassuring.  But Catherine doesn’t say anything, just keeps looking ahead, into the room where Ivashkin is twitching on his cot, the visible chunks of his body all clearly infused with cables and structure gel, including the hand clutching the photograph of his son.

 

Speaking of hands, you are still blatantly lacking one of yours.  You look around, but know that there’s not going to be any specifically useful instruction booklet on how to repair dead bodies for robot use.  Also you really want to stop having to worry about your fucking hand.  “Hey, so about that patch job you were talking about . . .”

  
“What?” says Catherine, jerking as if roused from a trance.

 

“My hand.”

 

“Oh.  Right.”  Finally Catherine looks at you.  “I think if we put a nonconductive material over the open part, we can use structure gel to make a permanent cast to seal it closed.  As long as the structure gel is allowed to harden, it should create an airtight bond that will survive this pressure.”

 

“Okay,” you say.  So, no option to replace, just to patch.  Fine, that’s fine.  “Okay, where do we find a nonconductive material?”

 

“If we can find anything made of plastic--- wrappers, bottles, things like that--- it should be good enough,” says Catherine.  “But we should probably add some structure gel to your arm to replace what you’ve lost first, in case the lack of gel causes a loss in motor control.”

 

“Well, that shouldn’t be a problem,” you say, gesturing vaguely at the gel-splattered common room.  Then you remember, “I just hope it doesn’t interact badly with the gel Ross made.”

 

Catherine, whose attention had become focused on the documents scattered over the center table, suddenly swings around to face you.  “What are you talking about?”

 

“Uh,” you say.  “Ross had a special type of structure gel up at Omicron that he was going to use kill the WAU.  I kind of accidentally used it to make the body I’m in now.  I think it has some kind of code in it?  Somehow it’s designed to kill the WAU’s programing, though hell if I know how.”

 

“How do you know all this?  I never saw any files like this back at Omicron,” says Catherine.  “And I thought Ross died on the Climber, before he even got to Omicron, so how could he have made it at all?”

 

“I”m not so sure about that.  Structure gel does weird things to people.  And as for  _ how _ I know, Ross kind of . . . told me.”  You shift uncomfortably under the stare Catherine levels at you for that.  “You remember that thing that got onto the Climber with us?  The thing you said stared at me and then disappeared?  That was Ross--- but, like, a gel-mutated version of him.”

 

“ _ That _ was Ross?” says Catherine.  “That creepy thing with enough electromagnetism to choke a whale was  _ Ross? _ ”

 

You nod.  “Yeah, it’s even worse when he talks, like someone on a bullhorn yelling at you through audio feedback.  And he never shuts up, which just makes it worse.”

 

“That just gives me more questions than answers,” says Catherine.  She puts her hand up to her helmet, then yanks it away quickly, as if stung.  “O-okay, let’s just.  Patch you up and figure out the rest later.”

 

“Sounds like a plan to me,” you say.  “Uh, how about you stay out here, and I’ll check the rooms.”

 

“That’s not necessary, Simon,” says Catherine.  Her shaky tone tells you that it’s completely necessary, but Catherine keeps talking.  “All we’re looking for is some plastic.  We need something small and flexible enough to cover the wound.  You know, there should be some kind of plastic disposable medical supplies in the infirmary.”

 

A gnawing  _ oh shit  _ realization creeps up on you, and you rush to say, “Catherine, I should tell you, there’s something up in the infirmary you don’t want to see.”

 

“What is it?”

 

“There’s . . . a person up there.  A dead person, but a very recently dead person,” you say carefully.  “She’s a friend of yours.”

 

“Sarah,” says Catherine suddenly, and you’ve never heard that tone of voice from her before.  You don’t know what it means, and you don’t get the chance to ask before Catherine has bolted for the stairs and started climbing.

 

“Goddamn--- shit--- ugh,” you grumble, floundering between trying to cover your arm and run after her at the same time.  By the time you manage to cover the stump with a discarded towel and lumber up the stairs, Catherine has reached Sarah Lindwall’s recently deceased body and is staring at it from her slump on the medical cot against the wall.

 

You shuffle over to the cot and gingerly sit next to her.  Catherine doesn’t acknowledge you.

 

Against your better judgment, you say, “She was still alive when I got here.”  You gesture with your elbow at the life support system rolled up by Lindwall’s chair.  “She was hooked up to that, still guarding the ARK.  I told her I came here to launch it, and she--- she asked me to let her die.  So I turned off the machine.”  Catherine continues not speaking, so you speak instead.  “She told me about Greenland, about how sorry she was they never launched the ARK.  She said you were cool.”

 

“Stop,” says Catherine.  “Just stop, please.”

 

“Sorry,” you say.

 

Silence reigns over the infirmary, the pair of you sitting side by side without saying a goddam thing.  Not even the steady drip of structure gel penetrates your mind: all you can hear is breathing, from you and Catherine, quiet and steady and in direct conflict with how Lindwall had sounded up to and including her death rattle.  You think about how many dead people you’ve seen since waking up at Upsilon.  You wonder how many dead bodies Catherine has seen.  Between the general effects of the WAU you’ve encountered and the Continuity Cult members Catherine knew, you may have her beat in numbers but she has you beat in emotional impact--- you’ve never had to watch your coworkers kill themselves because of your own creation.

 

Catherine looks over at you and then jumps, leaping to her feet and almost tripping over herself at the sudden movement.  “Oh!  Your arm, we need to patch that.”

 

You huff a dry laugh.  “Maybe there’s some plastic up here we can use.”

 

Catherine goes to the little alcove with a sink and storage unit, and comes back with an empty plastic IV bag.  She tears the tubes off, you remove the towel, and then she puts the plastic bag flat over the wound.

 

“Come stand over here, where the gel is dripping,” says Catherine, gesturing to the slop of gel leaking out of the ceiling.  “I don’t know how long it will take to set, but it’s a start.”

 

“Right, sure,” you say.

 

Neither of you says anything for a while as you watch the gel collect on your arm.  Catherine stays hovering beside you even though it would probably be less awkward for her to be sitting down on the cot instead.  You’re almost ready to break the silence when Catherine makes a shaky inhale.

 

“Who else is down here?” she asks.  “Who are the people in the rooms?”

 

“Pendersen, Ivashkin, Hill, the people stationed at Tau that didn’t get killed by monsters,” you say, thinking back to the manifest logs and audio files and data mining you got ahold of.  “Yoshida is the WAU monster here, the one in the suit.  Um.  Lindwall.”

 

“And me,” says Catherine quietly.

 

“And you.”

 

“Simon,” says Catherine, faltering, “do you know who killed me?”

 

“Catherine---”

 

“I just, I don’t understand,” she says in a rush.  “I don’t understand why.  I trusted them, I don’t understand how they could do that.”

 

“I don’t know, Cath.  I honestly don’t,” you say.

 

“You said--- you mentioned being able to data mine bodies.  Did you do that to me?”

 

You stare at your slowly blackening arm, the gel encompassing more and more of your wrist, and wish not for the first time that you had never mentioned finding her body.  “Yes.”

 

“What did you hear?”

 

“You, trying to launch the ARK.  The others, disagreeing.”

 

“What did I say?  The last thing I said?”

 

You look at her.  “Are you asking for your last words, Cath?”

 

“Maybe, I don’t know,” says Catherine, looking away.  She’s wringing her hands, shoulders up to her ears (or where her ears would be).  “There’s just so much I don’t know, so much I didn’t  _ care  _ about knowing before, but now I just.  I just don’t know what to think.”

 

“Take your time, think it over,” you say, stalling.  “Let me know what questions you really want answered.”

 

You lapse into silence again.  You hope this doesn’t become a pattern.  You don’t know if you can handle a lifetime of silence like this.  It’s a shame you don’t have a TV to distract you, or even some music to fill up the space.  This is the first time in a while you’ve thought about music, and it throws you off kilter; you get the sudden insatiable urge to play piano, and you kind of wish you could go back to complaining about the silence it if means you don’t have to grapple with the reality of never getting to play music again.  Will the tragedies never end?

 

“Simon?”

 

“Hmm?” you look over at Catherine, who at some point during your mental spiral wandered over to the console the ARK had been hooked up to.  She’s got a stack of photographs in one hand while the other taps at the keyboard, and from here you can see that she’s been flipping through the recently reviewed documents.

 

“Why didn’t anybody come down here?” she asks.  “From what I can tell, there’s been a food shortage from before the ARK team got here, but no indication that Omicron sent any relief.”

 

“Yeah, that’s because the radio links broke down, and then Dahl lied to the crew about the unsuccessful evacuation of Tau,” you say.  You went through Dr. Julia Dahl’s computer back at Omicron, listened to her audio notes and read her emails to Carthage Industries.  She was one of the few people you didn’t feel bad about finding headless, because you’re pretty sure if anyone deserved that death, it was her.  “She said they all died in September, and then when the ARK team got there in December they just stayed behind instead of going back up.  Ross took the Climber up, but died, I guess, and never told anyone about the survivors.”

 

“So everyone just . . . starved?”

 

“Seems like it,” you say.

 

Catherine looks down at the photos in her hands.  There’s a wetness to her voice when she speaks that makes it hard to listen to her without feeling bereft.  “You know, when designing the environment for the ARK, I asked everyone for pictures of their favorite places.  The Internet doesn’t work any more, so all the pictures they gave me were physical ones, taken themselves of their hometowns or of places they loved.  Sarah--- she traveled all over, and had some of the best pictures.  I used a lot of them, when making the ARK.”

 

“Then I guess she did get to see Greenland again after all,” you say.  The gel that’s been dropping steadily onto your arm has created a semi-solid hill of goop, and you use your hand to mold it around the stop of your wrist.  It hasn’t hardened completely, but you’ve got enough gel to work with that you can step away from the leak and go sit down on the cot.

 

“How do you---” starts Catherine, and you look up.  She’s put down the pictures and is standing in front of Sarah’s body.  “How do you access the blackbox?  Before, you said you could ‘hear the dead’ by syncing with their blackbox.  So, how did you do it?”

 

“I’m not really sure,” you admit.  The gel on your wrist looks an awful lot like black tar, and your brain still can’t tell if it should be painful to be lacking a hand.  “I just sort of touch them on their necks, and I can hear what was recorded last.”

 

Catherine hesitates, then slowly reaches out and rests two fingers high on Sarah’s neck, behind her jaw.

 

“Oh, that won’t work on her, she deactivated her blackbox,” you say.  “You’re not going to hear anything”

 

Catherine snatches her hand back.  “Oh.  But it works on the others?”

 

“Are you sure you want to hear that stuff?” you ask.  “It’s not pleasant.  I mean, it’s bad enough even when you don’t know any of these people, and I can’t imagine it’d be any easier to listen to it when you know them.”

 

“I want to know,” says Catherine, resolution building with each word.  “I need to know what happened to my team.”

 

Exhaustion is something you can’t feel in your bones anymore, it’s not a thing that can drag you down into sleep.  It’s a state of mind, a metaphysical surrender to a metaphorical check-out.  But you’re in the Hotel California now, and you can never, ever leave.

  
“Okay, Catherine,” you say tiredly, and stand up.  “Let’s go downstairs.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	10. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon makes a very difficult resolution.

You’ve been avoiding it for a while now, but it’s not something you can just put out of your mind, no matter how hard you’ve tried.  With only so many songs at your disposal before you need a break and a dead data tablet incapable of distracting you, you’ve finally run out of things to do that don’t involve you acknowledging the elephant in the room.

 

The power suit terminal is sitting obliquely in the center of the space, catching your attention like a hangnail at every turn.  It’s still working. Right now the screen is showing the suit activation process you'd started pre-scan, but you know you can switch out to its tracking feature.  You know you can find out where power suit D is.

 

It’s petty, but you really want the tracker to show that the Other You failed.  You want there to be a red mark on the screen, broken down somewhere in the Abyss.  You want to know that despite everything, Other You was not worthy enough to complete the mission.  That if it had been you, the  _ Real _ You, in the power suit, you’d have gotten to the Space Gun and left with the ARK without any problems.  You want Other You to have failed because he’s not  _ you _ .

 

Like you said, it’s petty.

 

Intellectually, you know that the best case scenario is for Other You to have gotten to the finish line.  You need to survive in some way on the ARK, and if that means the Other You gets to be the one to do it, then, that’s just what has to happen.  That doesn’t mean you have to like it, but who’s gonna give you shit about it now?

 

It's better to just get it over with.  Just look and know for sure.  That way you don't have to keep wondering, wasting brain space on something that ultimately doesn't even concern you anymore.

 

You stand around at the opposite end of the room from the power suit terminal, or as opposite as you can get when the thing is just off center in a small room, and debate over whether or not you really  _ need _ to look.

 

Fuck it.  You're not getting any younger, right?  Might as well look.

 

You go to the power suit terminal.  Only one screen is working, and it's displaying the Haimatsu Power Suit (HPS) Activation page for locker D.  You click out of the suit activation page and back to the main menu. You click on the link for the HPS Tracking page.

 

The screen changes to a simplified topographical map of the sea floor between site Omicron and site Tau.  Omicron isn’t technically on the map, but the Climber station is, along with some minor structures scattered between the two sites, and site Tau itself.  When you looked at it the first time, before you set up Raleigh Herber’s power suit to house your . . . Other You’s brain, there had been two triangles blinking in the area around the Climber landing site.  You hadn’t thought much of it at the time--- could’ve been dead members of the original ARK team for all you knew, and you kind of had other problems to deal with--- but now you pay attention.

 

Those two triangles haven't left, but now there’s a third triangle--- and it’s moving, blinking steadily as it roams around inside site Tau.  You can’t make the map move to show you site Phi, which is where the Space Gun is, in case the triangle is just approximating the power suit location when it would more accurately be at Phi instead of Tau.  But the map won’t move and the triangle stays within the confines of site Tau and you feel something like dread creep up into your brainspace.

 

“Why are you still in Tau?  Why aren’t you in Phi?” you wonder aloud.  More importantly, “Why aren’t you on the ARK?”

 

You stare at the screen, disbelieving.  And then you realize---

 

“You got left behind, too.”

 

Of course.  Of fucking  _ course _ , because it’s always a copy, not a transfer, that gets to keep going.  Other You was never going to get on the ARK.  He was just there to make a new copy, and once the ARK is gone, that copy will leave and Other You will stay.

 

It’s been at least three days since Other You and Catherine left for the Space Gun; that should be enough time to launch it.  Assuming everything still works down there, and nothing required severe repairs, or power boosts, or complicated operations expertise.  Assuming there was a way for Other You to scan himself again and get the copy onto the ARK before launching it.  Assuming that the ARK made it out of the ocean, and the atmosphere, and into low orbit.   _ Assuming assuming assuming--- _

 

What’s the old adage?  Assuming makes an ass out of you and me?

 

Well, you definitely feel like an ass right now.

 

Three days.  Other You has been at the bottom of the abyss for three days.  You’d bet everything that the Climber has broken down by now, that getting back to Omicron is a bust; everything you’ve run into along your mission has been on the edge of breaking down, and you doubt the Climber faired any better in the monolithic pressure at the ocean floor.

 

Did Catherine jump ship with the ARK?  Would she stay in the Omnitool with Other You, or would she check out the way Dr. Sarang and the other Continuity Cult members did?  She never said anything about staying behind in the Omnitool, but then, part of the plan was to keep you thinking of the brain scans as transfers instead of copies, and that’s hard to do if you go blabbing your plans to off your old self once your new copy is made.  If Catherine has left, that leaves just Other You down there, knocking around in a dilapidated base by himself.  At least he can be lonely in two buildings instead of just one dinky room.

 

Maybe it’s contradictory, considering how you feel about the validity of the Other You, but you hope Catherine stayed behind with him.  You hope he isn't stranded alone like you are, that he’s down there with someone to talk to, someone to ride out the rest of his existence on this barren plain with.

 

You can say from experience that it’s truly fucking terrifying to be so utterly alone.

 

What’s worse is that this is the second time you’ve misunderstood the brain scan process, and it’s fucking embarrassing.  How are you so bad at getting the concept?  It’s not hard, it shouldn’t be this hard.  Do you just not  _ want  _ to understand?  Is it less painful to conceptualize it as a transfer than a copy?

 

When you think about it--- really,  _ objectively  _ think about it--- you have to admit that you really just wanted a happy ending.  You wanted to win so badly that you’d believe anything, ignore anything, if it meant you could pretend for just a little longer.  Catherine played you, but not as hard as you played yourself.  You doubt Other You was any more capable of recognizing his own willful ignorance.  There’s so much you don’t even know you don’t know.

 

A thought occurs to you.  A really terrible thought.  Slowly you start to realize: Other You still doesn’t know you’re up here.  He doesn’t know that you’re still alive, that there is yet one more person left on this Earth.

 

If he knew you were alive, would he have tried to contact you?  Would he have tried harder to get back to Omicron?  You don’t know if there was a recall timer set for the Climber, but maybe you could find one, could bring him back up on it.  It could be that the Climber is fine, and Other You just didn't see the point in going back up when there was no one left to see.  If he knew about you--- if you could get the Climber working enough to take him back up---

 

You wouldn’t have to be alone anymore.  Instead of being trapped in a room for eternity you could have someone to talk to.  Faced with the reality of isolation, even you have to admit that a copy of yourself and the woman who put you in this hell is leaps and bounds better than staying locked in a room forever.  You could survive like that, you could keep your sanity with that kind of contact.

 

All you have to do is let Other You know you’re still alive.

 

. . . Using only your technological knowledge and the supplies in the Dive Room.

  
“Fuck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	11. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon is not coping well.
> 
> EDIT: huge thanks to @Gay_Blue_Space_Rock for pointing out my American-centrism in mentioning hospital bills for the very Canadian character of Simon! Sorry for the error! (the text has been changed to reflect this new information)

On April 10, 2015, you were in a car accident.

 

This is what you remember: driving on dark city streets after Music Night at The Grimoire had finally ended, after agreeing to take Ashley back to her place.  Trying to talk to her about the embarrassing shit Jesse told her after the punch had been thoroughly spiked, worried that she was going to tell Kevin and then you’d lose two friendships instead of one.  The light turning green.

 

The sound of tires screeching, confusion, blackness.

 

You remember looking over, realizing the world’s upside down, that Ashley is convulsing in the passenger seat, blood on her face, her chin, the inside of her mouth.  Ambulance sirens, flashing lights, urgent voices.  Warm liquid in your eyes, an ache between your ears.  A whirlwind of color, of hands on you, of words you can’t fathom.  A hospital room.  A death sentence.

 

Sean at your bedside, telling you it’s not your fault.

 

Kevin screaming at you, telling you it is.

 

You got headaches constantly.  You couldn’t handle the hospital lights or noises louder than a whisper.  Everything was designed to make your brain bleed, to bring you that much closer to hemorrhaging into your skull.  Breathing exercises only go so far, and at the end of the day you are still irreparably broken.  With a month of life left, you check yourself out of the hospital early and escape to your quiet apartment.  With a month of life left, you lie down on your bed and list everything you never managed to do.  It’s a long list.

 

You go to The Grimoire, even though you shouldn’t.  You go to Kevin’s house, even though you shouldn’t.  You go to your brother’s grave, even though you shouldn’t.

 

When Munshi calls you with the promise of his grad school experiment, you don’t have anything left to lose.  Nothing the other doctors suggested was any less absurd than a brain scan, so you go and you sit for him to take a picture of your soul, and that’s all you remember.

 

On May 2, 2015, a copy of your brain was made.

 

In a backroom server at Theta is a copy of your legacy scan, saved alongside three audio files about you.

 

You’ve listened to all of them.  You learned that Munshi was able to figure out a way to help repair your brain, that there was a cocktail of drugs and diet and who-knows-what that could fix you.  You heard your own hope in your recorded voice, felt the possibilities blooming in a place that had gone barren.  Then you listened to the final audio clip, to Munshi’s frustration and your own despondent resignation.  You learned that it failed.  You heard yourself offer up your brain scan to help further his research--- “like a donated organ”--- and heard the heart monitor beep slower and slower.

 

On June 1, 2015, you died.

 

 

* * *

 

 

If it was frustrating to know that the world would be easier to figure out if you could just open a door, it’s nothing compared to staring at a 22nd century computer terminal and knowing that nothing you do to it will make a radio signal magically appear between Omicron and Tau.  Dumb luck doesn’t help you this time, and no amount of dial turning or button pushing or switch flipping makes the computer cough up the secret to contacting the Other You.

 

Frustration is a sensation in your mouth, a phantom bite to your imaginary tongue that puts you on the knife edge between a destructive rage and a gross mental breakdown.  Each change of the numbers on the clock brings you closer to falling off that edge, though you don’t know which side you’ll land on.  Rage would be the most satisfying--- breaking shit, screaming, taking this whole place down with you--- but you know it’s better in the long run to just curl up and cry, with the only broken thing being you.  There’s no way to change the computer into something that will help, and there’s no way to control how your brain glitches whenever your anger piles on too high.

 

“Breathe, Simon, c’mon,” you mutter to yourself like a fucking basket case at hour 7, “just keep it together for a little longer.”

 

You’ve never hated a room like this.  Not even your hospital room gave you this feeling, this impotent rage that just festers and feeds itself the longer you stare at these unchanging screens.  It takes everything you’ve got not to bash the chair through the main console just to make something _happen_.

 

By hour 17 you’ve graduated to grunting, “This is stupid, this is fucking stupid,” over and over while you slam your palms against the wall in a fit of irrational anger.  Your brain conjures up memories of nights you spent fucking up chord progressions over and over, listening to your own failures and Jesse saying “No, like this---” and just that reminder of your past, of a life you can’t have anymore, is like ripping out the sutures on an unhealed wound.

 

It hurts, everything hurts, and there’s nothing you can do.  Nothing is working.  Nothing you do matters, nothing you try will make your situation any easier to bear, nothing is worth this _fucking_ sentience.

 

At hour 27 you have relegated yourself to the corner of the room hidden behind the bulk of the main door stairwell, curled up like a child afraid of the dark.  You’ve tucked your head against your knees, wrapped your arms around your head.  You can hear your fake body fake breathe and you count each breath on an alternating 7-11 pattern of inhale to exhale.  You pretend like this is important to the regulation of blood flow through your limbs and torso and head, that you need to keep your stress levels down so that your brain doesn’t swell in it’s skull and make you bleed out of the top of your scalp.  You pretend like you’re back in Toronto, hiding in the storage room of The Grimoire during your shift and that Jesse or Ashley will come looking for you if they need you, but for now you can just tuck yourself between boxes of comic books and pretend like you’re not going crazy.

 

You’ve found that your brain does not remember your past life as well as it remembers your time in PATHOS-II.  Memories of every site you traversed are crisp and exact, like a continuous movie that you can’t edit down.  Memories of Toronto, of your life as a twenty-something college dropout in urban Canada, are fuzzy.  Incomplete.  You imagine them as photographs taken close together but not perfectly in order--- some things seem to have slipped your mind completely, some parts of an image or event are just fucking wrong.  You try to remember Ashley’s laugh and Sean’s smile and you just can’t get it _right._

 

After a while, you realize that your memory has a weird loophole--- a raw memory of your time Before is hard to capture, but once you remember it, you have a perfect recollection of remembering that memory.  You can log it as perfect if you can just remember it to begin with.

 

You also exponentially increase your number of memories.  Backtracking through 25 years of life is surprisingly long, and you end up with this epic, endless stream of remembering.  Remembering your childhood out of order, remembering the shitty way you felt in college, and then in middle school, and then the hospital room.  Everything gets out of order--- everything is jumbled, brought back remastered and retouched, but still fucking _wrong_ \--- and when you try to remember it again in the correct sequence, you just end up with a longer reel of memories, not a replaced set.  

 

You’re a copy of yourself, only capable of copying yourself over and over, until even your memories are just copies of copies.

 

It’s been hours, but fuck if you know what time it is.  What you know is that you are two steps away from the power bulb and in serious fucking danger of leeching power out of it.

 

It’s the worst thing you could possibly do.

 

It’s the only thing you can think about.

 

You don’t even need the power.  You just need something to fucking _do_ , something you can effect change on.  So you grab the empty glass vat and hurl it against the Pilot Seat.  You watch it shatter, splintered glass sticking in the gel and tumbling over the tech, shards of light winking back at you mockingly.  You scream.  You run a circuit around the room, over and over, until you end up curled up in the far corner again, where you can’t see the bulb and be tempted into any more fucking idiocy.

 

Eventually, you get swallowed up by the silence and your own past, and you completely forget about where you are.  Reality may still exist, but you don’t know of it, because all you can see is your life from Before and that’s all you can fucking care about.

 

Hour 47 ticks over and the main terminal lights up with a screen you don’t recognize.  A beep shatters the quiet of the Dive room and a smooth, British female voice says:

  
“Signal detected.  DUNBAT hailing Dispatcher Herber.  Requesting permission to dock.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	12. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Success is not what Simon imagined it'd be.

It takes maybe a day and a half for Catherine to go through all of Ross’ notes.

 

About two seconds after that she suggests, “Let’s go to Alpha, see if there’s anything we can recover from those servers.”

 

After about five minutes of arguing you fold, and follow Catherine.

 

You’re kind of a sucker, but you also really want a break from all the corpses and cramped spaces of Tau’s common room.  There’s only so much time you can spend pacing or sitting or thinking before even talking to Lindwall’s corpse seems like a valid pastime.  A little day trip to refresh your head couldn’t hurt.

 

Site Alpha is a spectre of doom in your head, but in person it’s about as quiet and benign as library.  An underwater, gel-infested, bookless library, but that’s just nitpicking.  Getting through it is a pain--- like everything else now, you keep finding new and awful ways to remember that you are forever one hand short--- but not impossible, and the layout is similar enough to the other PATHOS-II sites that Catherine can navigate you both successfully to the personal office of Johan Ross.

 

Actually, you’re not entirely sure how Catherine knows which random, seemingly identical room belonged to Ross, but she picks the room with the computer that’s still mostly accessible despite the gel growths, so you’re not going to question it.

 

“All we need to do is locate and copy as many files as we can,” says Catherine, as if that were a completely feasible task and not a risky coin flip.  Catherine may have managed to fix three Omnitools and upgrade one of them enough to get special access to protected files, but that’s no guarantee that there will be any files to access.  Catherine docks the Omnitool and wipes away some of the gel dripping over the semi-covered computer screen.  “We’ll get as much out of this computer as we can, and then we can try the server room.  There might still be back ups of some of the general information there.”

 

“Assuming that the computers are even working,” you say.

 

As if to spite you, the terminal boots up after a few glitchy ERROR readings, eventually flashing a SAFE MODE ACTIVATED message that precedes a standard menu screen.

 

“Perfect,” says Catherine.  “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

 

A lot of nonsense, apparently.  Okay, technically it’s code, but it makes no fucking sense to you so you count it as nonsense.  Catherine is rapt, her whole body hunched over the terminal, red light eyes twitching as she scans each line of scrambled letters and numbers.

 

“Wow,” says Catherine.

 

“What?”

 

“This is a lot more complicated than I thought,” she says.

 

“Why?  What do you mean?”

 

Catherine shakes her head.  “Hand me the storage drive, please.”   
  


You hand over the blank chip you’d stashed in your belt pouch--- one of the only things entrusted to you for this trip, since apparently having one hand means you can’t have the good baton or the good Omnitool, which is complete bullshit--- before pressing, “No, seriously, what’s complicated?”

 

“The WAU.  I mean, I knew it was complicated, I just didn’t realize to what extent.”  She piggy backs the storage chip onto the tool chip, and then starts downloading files off the computer.  “This whole place is a brain.  All these structure gel pipes and bulbs and wires?  They’re basically the WAU’s brain matter.  It’s been expanding far beyond what Ross’ notes speculated.”

 

“That’s . . . creepy,” you say, eyeing the surrounding gel growths trepidatiously.  “Does that mean it can feel us right now?  Does it know we’re here?”

 

“Probably not in the way you’re thinking of it, but it certainly knows something’s going on,” says Catherine.  “Accessing this computer is like pressing on a nerve for the WAU: it’s a signal that something is happening, and a complex system like the WAU will eventually figure out the exact cause.”

 

Catherine keeps going through the files and menu options as she talks, her tone thoughtful, as if she’s vocalizing her own musings back to herself rather than to you.  “I think part of what doomed the Tau crew were Ross’ electronic notes.  The WAU has access to his hardware and wireless data, which meant it could read and act on the information Ross recorded.  Ross’ written decision to go to Omicron to make a poison for the WAU coincides with the wildlife attacks at the Climber and the LUMAR relays.  It was trying to protect itself and thus the majority of the PATHOS-II crew, so it reached out into the environment to manipulate the humans that could hurt it.  Now that its body is getting bigger and its spacial awareness is evolving, it may try other means to affect change on its environment.  It’s so fascinating.”

 

“But if that’s true, then it’s responsible for killing everyone at Tau,” you remind her.  “If it were really that concerned with saving human life, wouldn’t it have  _ stopped  _ the sea monsters from attacking the evacuation party?”

 

“For the majority of PATHOS-II to survive, the WAU needs to survive, because that’s the WAU’s prerogative,” says Catherine matter-of-factly.  “The WAU is smart, Simon.  It knows that to save many you might have to sacrifice a few.  It chose to sacrifice the people at Tau in order to save the people at Omicron, Theta and Upsilon.”

 

“But it didn’t save them!”  Your voice sounds weird when you yell, the vibration carrying outside your helmet and into water.  You try to tone it down, saying, “It blew up everyone’s head in Omicron, and I don’t think the people in Theta really count as alive.”

 

Catherine glances at you, then looks pointedly at the screen.  “When I was in the computer at Theta, I could see the blackbox locator signal map.  I don’t know what they looked like to you, but all those people had vital signals strong enough to meet the bare minimum for life, which is the goal of the WAU.  We only see a problem with it because the methods it uses are horrific and wouldn’t, by our human definitions, actually be considered ‘preserving’ life.  That doesn’t mean it’s not doing its job.”

 

“And Omicron?  How do you explain that?”

 

“Herber was in the power suit near the Dive room, the last place the WAU would have access to her on the site,” says Catherine.  “She was getting ready to go down with the poison gel.  The WAU waited for the last possible moment before stopping her.”

 

You stare at her.  “Are you really trying to justify all the crazy shit the WAU has done?”

 

“I’m just trying to understand it, Simon,” says Catherine in that forced-patient tone.  “Figuring out what the WAU is doing and why will be a huge help to us.  The better we understand our situation the better equipped we are to succeed.”

 

“Succeed at what?  Not dying?  You made it pretty clear that isn’t going to be a problem for us.”

 

“Will you just let me do this?” snaps Catherine finally, hunching further over the console.  “It’s hard enough reading all this data without having an argument with you at the same time, I don’t want to keep rehashing this fight over and over with you on top of that.”

 

You clam up, your one remaining fist clenching and unclenching in frustration.  Your brain gives you the phantom sensation of your missing hand clenching in tandem, and the realism of it has you spooked; it feels exactly as if you suddenly regrew a hand.  Which is impossible, and a discreet glance down proves it--- your wrist terminates in hardened black gel.  You’re just imagining things in your anger, and now you’re angry all over again at Catherine and your hand and this whole shitty situation.

 

Catherine isn’t looking any happier.  The screens keep popping ERROR signals, and she’s starting to press unnecessarily hard every time she clicks on something.  The ERROR windows keep coming, and then the beeping starts.

 

“That’s not good, is it,” you say, just as the beeping gets louder.  Then the screen goes black.

 

“Shit,” says Catherine eloquently.

 

The gel growths around you start to glow, little clear bulbs bursting out of the black clumps in a flash of blue light.  All around you the water has been a constant pressure, but now it seems to get stronger, closer knit, and you almost can’t help the way your breathing gets labored and shallow in response.

 

“Time to leave?” you ask.

 

“Time to leave,” agrees Catherine.

 

Nothing chases you out and nothing tries to stop you from leaving, but the gel has started to move along the walls and floors, and you end up lurching through a mini swamp of structure gel just to get past the threshold.  Once you’re out of the building proper, though, the weirdness seems to stop.

 

“There was so much more on that computer to get to,” says Catherine once you’ve reached the cargo tunnel.  She’s looking down at her Omnitool, storage chip still attached.  “I didn’t even download half of what I saw, and this chip still has so much space available.”

 

“I don’t think going back to download more is going to work,” you say, hoping she doesn’t try suggesting that.

 

“No, you’re right,” says Catherine.  And then, “But Tau’s computers are still available to us.  There must be something left there.”

 

“Please don’t say what I think you’re going to say,” you plead.

 

Catherine turns to you as you walk, and says, “We need to search the lab computers.”

 

“Fuck,” you say.

 

Getting out of Tau had been a non-event: the Power Suit Monster had left the site through the damaged DUNBAT hangar, and thus wasn’t around when you were navigating the site (“It can work the pressure chambers but not ladders?  How does that make sense?”; “Please don’t tempt fate with questions like that.”).  But there’s no way to know if it’s still wandering around outside or if it’s returned and waiting to ambush you inside Tau.

 

It seems like the monster is still gone when you return.  It’s not there when you enter the maintenance area, and it’s not there when you cross over into the labs.  You have your stun baton at the ready, but it’s hard to hold the bulky weapon steady when you’ve only got one hand, and Catherine needs both her hands and attention to manipulate the computers, leaving you as the only line of defense.  You really, really hope the monster is still outside.

 

“Make this quick, okay?” you say, standing between Catherine and the door of the first lab you decide to raid.

 

“Right, right,” says Catherine absently from her position over the computer.

 

“Not a whole lot of confidence right here,” you say, risking a glare over your shoulder at her.

 

“Will you stop it?  I’m trying to concentrate.”  You hear the click clack of her suit gloves against the computer terminal.  Then, in a carefully nonchalant tone, “You know, this whole search would be so much easier if I were in the Omnitool instead of out here.  I could find all these files in a flash, would’ve been able to get more out of the Alpha computers, too, instead of getting locked out by the WAU.  The upsides are innumerable.”

 

“Well, you’re stuck back in your body now, so we’ll just deal with it as-is,” you say tersely.

 

“I don’t--- that’s not exactly true, you know,” says Catherine.

 

“What?”

 

Catherine sighs.  “Nevermind.  I’m almost done here, then we can move to the next computer.”

 

The monster is still a no-show by the time you make the move to a new room, and the lack of action gives you time to think about Catherine’s point.

 

“What did you mean, it wasn’t true?” you ask, when you’ve taken up your position by the door and Catherine has gotten into the computer.  Your curiosity, for better or worse, keeps you dogging a topic you know will take you to a place you don’t want to go.

 

Catherine sounds almost nervous as she says, “Just that, it’s not true.  We don't have to make do with me outside of the Omnitool.  This Omnitool is upgraded enough now to be universally useful, and the Cortex chip slot is still empty.  I could go right back to how I was, before.”

 

“You  _ are  _ how you were before,” you remind her.  “You’re a person with a human shape and brain and everything.  It’s just like you said, a sound mind in a sound body.”

 

“But I was sound in the Omnitool,” points out Catherine.  “I managed that just fine.  I liked being in the Omnitool, I told you that.”

 

You shake your head, and just barely refrain from taking your attention away from the door.  “But that was just because there wasn’t any other option.  Now there is!  You’re in your body, your  _ real  _ body.  It can’t get better than that.”

 

“That’s not true, either,” says Catherine.

 

“The set-up we’ve got is fine,” you say.  You can’t believe you’re actually having this conversation right now.  How is this even a point of contention?  “I know you’re mad about the Alpha site data loss, but it’s a miracle we found anything working down there.  You being in the Omnitool wouldn’t change that, and it’s not like you can magically transform into one.  Besides, I think we’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

 

“Fine.  I guess I’ll just deal with it,” says Catherine darkly, and your response gets cut off because down the hall you can hear the alarm of the pressure chamber for the hangar start up.  It’s the only warning you get before the containment doors open and you risk getting penned in by the monster, and fuck if you’re going to risk that just to talk extra sense into Catherine..

 

“Go, go, go!” you shout as your optics glitch--- whose stupid idea was it to put the hangar next to the labs?--- and both you and Catherine bolt down the hallway towards the ladder.  The Power Suit Monster screams, gets close enough to make your brain rattle, your hand shaking enough that you drop your stun baton.

 

You leave it where it falls, but you still snap, “For fuck’s sake, I can climb just fine!” when Catherine stops at the ladder to let you go first.  She has her stun baton raised and at the ready, one hand on the door lock mechanism.  You climb, hauling yourself up two rungs at a time, and rolling clear of the top as fast as you can.  Catherine shuts door and is close behind, her slowness gone just long enough to get her onto the upper corridor before her balance tips her into the wall and sends her sprawling next to you.

 

Side by side, the snarling of the monster contained behind the ladder door, you and Catherine rest in relative safety, panting unnecessarily into your helmets.

 

Exhaustion is a weird mix of fantasy and expectation:  you have been awake for days, and yet you haven’t slept, so your mind is convinced it must sleep but your body can’t.  You just fucking cant.  You don’t know how to sleep, how to rest, in the body you’ve got now, so you just keep going.  Lying on the floor, you fantasize about falling asleep like this, imagine closing your eyes and drifting off.

 

But your eyes don’t close and your brain doesn’t stop and your body isn’t yours.  Catherine has her body, her real body, and the rancid jealousy of that fact overtakes you.

 

She would rather abandon her body, abandon  _ you _ , to be a pocket computer again.  You’re stuck in the corpse of a woman you’ve never met, but Catherine get’s to have her brain in her matching body, and it’s still not enough for her.  She cares so little about something you’d die for, and for one blinding second you are furious.

 

“I hate this,” is what you say aloud.  Your voice sounds vicious even to you, but you can’t seem to swallow back the words that pour out of you.  “I hate Tau, I hate going into the labs.  I hate monsters.  I hate the WAU.  I hate this fucking ocean.  I hate Ross and PATHOS-II and structure gel---”

 

_ I hate Catherine _ is what you don’t say.

 

“I know, Simon,” says Catherine tiredly.  “That’s the price of success, remember?

 

“But it’ll be okay,” she says.  “Let’s just take this one day at a time.  Let’s go--- let’s go see what’s in these files.”

 

Catherine gets up and heads for the Common room.  You lay there a moment longer, staring at the ceiling and imagining, for a brief moment, what it would’ve been like to fail.

  
Then you get up, and follow Catherine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	13. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon gets rescued!

“What?” you say, lifting your head from your fetal position in the corner.

 

There’s a pause, and then the voice repeats, “Signal detected.  DUNBAT hailing Dispatcher Herber.  Requesting permission to dock.”

 

You scramble to your feet and half run, half stumble your way to the computer terminal.  The main screen has changed to show a pop up window with the phrase _DUNBAT requesting radio contact with Dispatcher Herber_ and two buttons for Accept or Decline.

 

You accept the call.

 

Static fills the room, sound pouring out of the hidden speakers like a torrential waterfall, and then a brusque, male voice asks, “Who is this?”

 

There’s nothing to justify the gut punch of disappointment you feel when the voice on the line is clearly not Other You.  It’s a voice you recognize, though, from your datamining of a Wrangler at Theta.  You think he sounds like Brandon Wan, the man who sabotaged the elevator to keep the WAU-infected Proxies from killing the rest of the Thea crew.  He’s also the man whose brain scan you and Catherine used to get the security cyphers needed to override the security protocols set on the WAU-contaminated DUNBAT, which had promptly escaped its quarantine hold in Theta after Catherine woke it up.

 

You know that Brandon Wan died in the lower level of site Theta months ago.  You also know that the escaped DUNBAT has a brain scan inside it.

 

You take a breath and try to keep your voice even.  “This is Simon.  Who are you?”

 

“What are you, Simon?”

 

“I’d rather know who you are first,” you say, and wonder if he even knows.  He has to know.  He hailed Omicron as the DUNBAT, there’s no way he doesn’t know.  Right?

 

“Answer the question,” snaps Brandon.   _“What are you?”_

 

You are arrested by the paralyzing fear that saying the wrong thing could send Brandon away for good, and it takes every fibre of your courage to say in your calmest voice,“I’m the brain scan of a human, stuck in a body that’s not mine.”

 

“So you’re a robot?” asks Brandon.

 

“I think technically I’m closer to an android,” you say.

 

“But are you a robot that knows it’s not human?” clarifies Brandon.  “You’re not running around thinking you’re the one and only, right?”

 

The irony of that statement is enough to choke you.  “I know I’m not a human.  I’m also not contaminated by the WAU, if that’s what you’re trying to get at.”

 

“The WAU?”  Brandon is noticeably confused, which is not at all what you were expecting.  “What do you mean?  What are you talking about?”

 

“I’m talking about the WAU A.I.?” you say, a little baffled  It’s impossible not to notice the WAU’s influence, or at least you thought so.  “It’s the thing that’s behind all of this: it’s been messing with the robots to make sure all the people stay alive, but it has a really skewed definition of ‘alive’, so everything it’s done has just made things worse.”

 

“No, seriously, what are you talking about?” says Brandon, and he seems caught between suspicious and askance.  You hope the latter wins out.  “The WAU is just the AI for PATHOS-II, it’s a glorified security system.  I mean, Strohmeier had his doubts, but it wasn’t the evil bad guy of the sci fi film you’re thinking of.”

 

“I don’t--- sorry, let’s back up a bit.”  Obviously you missed something here, or at least Brandon did.  “Can I ask--- are you a brain scan of someone?”

 

Brandon’s tone is cold when he says, “You don’t have the right to ask me that.”

 

“You asked _me_ that,” you remind him.

 

“So?  You could’ve been a rogue machine ready to sabotage me.  I needed to make sure before engaging with you,” says Brandon.  Which is ridiculous, how are you supposed to sabotage anyone from the Dive Room?  How could you mess with the DUNBAT, a machine you saw once, barely, made in the 22nd century, from a room you can’t leave?

 

“Well, I’m not trying to sabotage you,” you assure him.  Somehow you keep the condescension out of your voice, and manage something approaching civil.  “So are you a brain scan of someone else?”

 

It takes a long time for Brandon to respond.  When he does, it’s haltingly, with the kind of forced nonchalance of someone who is very, very scared.  “I think I am.  I’m not . . . entirely sure”

 

“What makes you unsure?” you ask.

 

“All I remember is going in to see Catherine for my scan for the ARK,” says Brandon, and he’s matching your calm tone note for note, like a weird kind of harmony, but it’s not enough to fool you, “except I don’t remember the scan.  And I _know_ I’m not on the ARK, Robin showed me the mock ups for the virtual reality setting, and none of them were of PATHOS-II in ruins.”

 

“Okay,” you say after a moment.  Wow.  Wow, this just got a lot more difficult, didn’t it?  “I think I know what happened.  You were scanned, and that scan is on the ARK where it’s supposed to be.  But the WAU has been copying brain scans of people and putting them into robots, to make the people they belong to ‘alive’ again.”

 

“Are you saying I’m dead?” asks Brandon.

 

That’s not the part you wanted him to pick up on, but, “I don’t know.  I haven’t met any living people around here so far.  Though it might help if I actually knew who you were.”

 

“Brandon.  Brandon Wan,” he says, and you do a mental fist pump at being right.  “I’m a Wrangler for Delta, or at least I was.  We all got evacuated to Theta in August, except Ackers.  I was first from my group to volunteer for the scan, once we got there.”

 

“Nice to meet you Brandon,” you say.

 

“Nice meeting you too, Simon,” says Brandon, bemused.  Then, with an edge, “I don’t remember anyone I worked with being named Simon, though.”

 

“Yeah, that’s the thing,” you say, and here comes the hardest part, “I’m not actually part of PATHOS-II.  I’m sort of a stowaway.”

 

Brandon’s pause speaks volumes, but he elaborates anyway.  “There are no stowaways in PATHOS-II.  Everyone on the surface is dead, and I know everyone who survived.  If you snuck down here, I’d have known about it before now.  So how the fuck did you get here?”

 

These are all very good points.  Incredibly good points that you can’t refute and goddamn but you didn’t want to have to do this.  It was bad enough realizing the truth for yourself, and trying to talk to Catherine about it hardly helped settle it in your mind, so being forced to explain the whole mess now is terrifying and necessary in equal measures.

 

You bite the bullet and blurt, “My brain scan happened in 2015.  David Munshi saved it, and used it for his research.  A copy of my scan was saved on the PATHOS-II archives, and I guess the WAU decided to bring me back with the rest of you.”

 

The stunned cursing that follows is weirdly validating.  “Holy shit.  2015?  That was---”

 

“A hundred years ago, yeah,” you say.  You let out a shaky, impromptu laugh.  “I’m a time traveler.  A shitty one considering the circumstances, but nobody expects to wake up _after_ the apocalypse.”

 

“Holy fucking shit.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“So you just woke up here, in a robot on Omicron?” asks Brandon, voice still carrying that thread of shock.

 

“Actually, I woke up in Upsilon.  I’ve been trying to get to the ARK to launch it, since it got stuck at Tau,” you say.

 

“The ARK project really worked?” says Brandon, awed, and then in a much darker tone, “Wait, the ARK is still _here?_  What the fuck happened, why isn’t it in space?”

 

“I don’t know,” you say.  “That’s why I was trying to get to it.  It should’ve been launched by now, though.”

 

“Damn right it should’ve, it’s been fucking months!”  Brandon’s tone has changed enough to set your teeth on edge, to ping your flight or fight response.   _Danger, danger_ .  “The whole point of these scans was to get the damn thing off Earth, and they couldn't even manage _that?_ ”

 

“No, I mean,” you flounder for your bearings under the weight of Brandon’s tirade, trying to make yourself heard, “you’re right that it should’ve been launched before now, but what I meant was, I’ve already launched it.  A couple days ago, at least.  Can you see the Climber from where you are?  It should be gone.”

 

Brandon snaps, “The Climber is down at Tau.  But that doesn’t explain a goddamn thing, because _you_ are still here.  If you actually launched it, you would be at Tau right now, not chatting to me over the fucking Omicron radio.”

 

“I did launch it, sort of.  I can’t alter my current body, but I needed a body that could withstand the pressure, so I made a copy of my brain and put it into a power suit.”  You swallow, force your shaky hands to lie flat on the console.  “That’s the version of me that went down and launched the ARK.  I’m the version that stayed behind.”

 

“What do you mean by ‘body’?” asks Brandon.  “What kind of body to you have?”

 

“It’s sort of hard to explain,” you say, because it is, and you have the sinking suspicion that the truth will be enough to drive Brandon away, and that’s a risk you’re not quite willing to take.

 

Brandon is insistent.  “Try me.”

 

“Will you tell me what kind of body you have, if I tell you mine?” you ask.

 

“Sure, why the fuck not,” says Brandon, tone swinging wildly between flippant and frustrated, “let’s just do one big show and tell for everybody, put all our cards on the table.  That’ll be fucking swell.”

 

You hesitate, uncertain, before saying, “Okay, well, I’m a Cortex chip hooked up to the central nervous system of a corpse stuck in a diving suit.  I’m powered by structure gel and a battery pack.”

 

There’s silence on the other end of the radio and you suffer an enon of heart attacks before Brandon lets out a strangled curse.

 

“Goddamn.  Are you ever going to say something that doesn’t sound batshit crazy?”

 

“Uh, probably not.”  The relief is a battering ram to the head.  You slump over the console and try to quiet your breathing.  After a pause you realize Brandon hasn’t spoken again, and you rush to prompt him into talking.  “And what about you?”

 

Which _does not work_ because Brandon goes radio silent again and you are this close to just shouting down the line at him to _keep fucking talking_ when he finally seems to wrestle up whatever nerve he needed to continue on.

 

“. . . I’m.  I’m in the DUNBAT.  It’s this deep-sea submersible vessel meant for quick trips to the lower sites in the Abyss.  It was kept at Theta, even though it probably should’ve been at Omicron, but that shit’s above my paygrade.”  He’s babbling and seems to realize it, slowing his voice down as he continues, “Anyway, I just go in for the stupid scan and I wake up and suddenly I have a thousand eyes and people in my guts but I can’t---  I don’t know.  It fucked me up to realize I’m in the DUNBAT, but it’s starting to feel less insane than thinking about being in a goddamn corpse.”

 

You don’t snort, but it’s a near thing.  “That does put a lot in perspective.”

 

“Is there anyone else in there with you?” asks Brandon in the most obvious attempt at a topic change you’ve heard since Catherine’s lack of patience at the zeppelin dock.

 

You go with it though, and say, “I don’t think so.  Just WAU monsters last time I saw, but I’m locked in the Dive Room right now, so I can’t say for sure.”

 

“Locked in?” echoes Brandon.  “I mean, the power is pretty low here, but you should still be able to get around if your Omnitool has the right Tool chip.”

 

“I don’t have an Omnitool anymore.  The other me took it with him to operate the Climber,” you say.

 

“So you’re just . . . stuck in a room?  Can’t you override the safe mode from there?”

 

“I don’t know how to use any of these computers,” you tell him, the frustration and exhaustion that built up over the last two days crushing down on you all at once.  “I can’t make anything work, I can’t access anything outside these walls, I’m just.  I’m fucking stuck.”

 

“Oh,” says Brandon.  “Well that’s shitty.”

 

“Yeah.”  You stare at the screen in front of you without seeing the words, a fever haze of hope and terror messing with your senses.  A shaky breath, then another, then, “Do you--- do you know how I could get out?  I can’t stay in here, it’s driving me fucking crazy.”

 

“How long have you been there?” asks Brandon.

 

“Too fucking long.  Please, if there’s anything you can do, anything you know about, tell me.”  You don’t mean to sound so pathetic, but you can’t hold it back anymore, and you’re not sure you’ve got the dignity left to care.  “Help me out, Brandon.”

 

Brandon might realize you’re at your wits end or he might not; either way, his voice is noticeably quieter when he speaks.  “Okay, okay, hold on.  There’s gotta be a way around this.  Let me check some things out.”

 

“D-don’t leave!  Don’t go away, _please_ ,” you say quickly, because it sounds like he’s _leaving_ , and he can’t leave yet, _he can’t leave you here---!_  “I can’t be alone anymore, I can’t handle it.”

 

“I’m not leaving,” Brandon assures you.  “I’m just looking around Omicron,  gonna see if I can access any of the security systems from the outside.  I’ll keep the comm. link open, okay?”

 

“Thank you, just--- thank you.”  You take a few deep breathes.  “I’ve just been alone here for a while and it’s really messing with me.”

 

“Yeah, I get it,” says Brandon, in the kind of tone that tells you he really does _get it._  He’s probably the only person left on Earth who could possibly understand your situation.

 

You can hear the low static of the open comm. link and the rasp of your own breathing, like highway traffic, like blood rushing through your ears.  The room already sounds less empty with just the barest hint of another life waiting on the other side of the walls.  If you could smile you’d be beaming, you’d be grinning like a fucking loon.

 

“I’m glad you’re here, Brandon,” you tell him.  “I’m glad there’s someone else here.”

 

“Yeah, I’m glad you’re here, too, Simon,” says Brandon, a little wryly.  Then he’s all business, saying, “Damn, this place has really gone to the dogs.  The signal strength couldn’t bench press a twig, and that scaffolding shit by the side door is two good knocks away from falling apart.”

 

“Well that’s comforting,” you say.

 

“Uh, sorry,” says Brandon sheepishly.  “It actually doesn’t look that bad, considering the rest of the sites.  I’m not trying to freak you out, just talking aloud.  I sorta got used to that.”

 

“It’s okay,” you tell him.  “Talk as much as you want.  I’m not going anywhere.”

 

“ _Yet_ ,” corrects Brandon. “I think I’ve got a good handle on the state of the server now--- which is total shit, by the way, all the worst parts of complicated and underpowered--- but I think I can figure out some way to exploit the--- aha!”  There’s a baited pause before he continues, “I think I’ve got something.  There’s a built in evacuation protocol that can override safe mode, and it will open all the exterior doors without requiring an Omnitool.”

 

“That sounds like a damn good solution,” you say.  “Can you make it do that from the outside?”

 

“Maybe?”  There’s another pause, and then Brandon cheers.  “Fuck yeah!  Ok, just gimme a sec.”

 

Excitement, bewildered and uncertain, bubbles up inside you.  This could be it.  This could be your fucking god-from-the-machine, your last-minute-savior.  You pace nervously in front of the computer, and there’s an urge in you to pack your things, as if you’re about to go on an whirlwind vacation.  What have you got to take?  It’s not like you were traveling heavy before now, and Other You took everything of value when he left.

 

The broken Omnitool.  It is completely worthless, but you need to do something with your hands, and, hey, it could be useful later.  You jog the short distance to grab the Omnitool off the side table, and then hurry back to the main terminal, worried that in the time you were away from it the signal might’ve been lost or Brandon might’ve left or that this whole thing is just an elaborate construction of your brain that will fall apart if you don’t pay attention.

 

“What have you got, Brandon?” you prompt him when the silence gets to be too much.  “What’s going on?”

 

“Working on tripping the emergency system,” says Brandon distractedly.  “This shit’s all encrypted to hell and back, and there’s just not enough power to keep the signal strong between me and the site.  Fucking--- aggh, hang on.”

 

You wait it out, listening to the somewhat erratic hum of static over the speakers and Brandon’s cussing.  Infinity is compacted into the space between one burst of white noise and the next, holding you down in the purgatory of half-hopes.  Everything is resting on Brandon, a stranger you only know through the nature of his last act at Theta.  Of all the people to rely on, though, you have a feeling that the guy who sacrificed himself to save his friends from death-by-monster is a pretty good bet.

 

Suddenly Brandon is back on the comm., saying, “Okay, I think I’ve got it!  This is gonna---”

 

And then a siren starts blaring out of the speakers, and it’s so unexpected that you drop to the floor in a crouch like a frightened animal.  Red lights flash at the corners of the room, and all the computer screens around you are emblazoned with the words EVACUATION INITIATED.  Your chest feels like a clotted lump of crystallized adrenaline, and you have to forcefully restart your breathing before you even begin calming yourself down.

 

“---get loud.  Sorry, but at least it worked!”

 

“Thanks!” you shout over the blare of the siren.  “Now what happens?”

 

“Go to the pressure chamber,” says Brandon, just as the door leading out to the Climber opens.  You put the busted Omnitool inside the magnetic holster at your thigh and get into the chamber, where you find the door access console.  Right now it’s just showing the EVACUATION INITIATED window, along with a warning about automated pressure equalizing and a countdown timer.  “It might take a while, but eventually it’ll close on it’s own and fill with water without you needing to do anything, and then the outside door will open.  I’m coming your way now.”

 

You have to lean out of the chamber to hear him talk, and you tell him, “The comm. link only seems to work inside the Dive Room.  How am I supposed to let you know if something goes wrong inside the pressure chamber?”

 

“Don’t worry, if the system fucks up, I can get you out of the pressure chamber.  As long as it’s filled with water first---  but even that’s not really going to be a problem.”

  
The chamber door rumbles.  “It’s starting to close!  I’ll see you soon, Brandon!” you shout, half promise and half plea, as the pressure chamber seals shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	14. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon makes a new friend.

It’s a goddamn eon before the water fills up the room.  The siren keeps going, the lights keep flashing, but then there’s a steadily rising pool of water to surround you in preparation for the outside.  You have no sensation of the true pressure or temperature of the water--- most of that’s due to your frankly amazing diving suit, the rest is probably a side effect of being a robot whose human brain never got further than ankle-deep in Lake Ontario--- but your body acclimatizes itself to the weight change and movement restrictions quick enough, and you might as well be in the air-filled structure of Omicron for all the challenge it gives you.

 

A mechanical groan emanates from the outer door, the metal seams separate and recede, and then you’re staring out at a long catwalk leading into the open ocean.  You don’t waste a second--- you jump right out, landing on the mesh platform that hosts the lock structure for the Climber cage. The Climber isn’t there anymore, but you can see where it would’ve been, where Other You would’ve boarded it for the long ride down.  You look away from that reminder, and instead look for Brandon. 

 

Despite all the time and energy spent on getting the DUNBAT working at Theta, you never actually got to see its full form.  So much of your effort was spent just trying to unlock the hanger hiding the vessel, and the one chance you finally had to see it was just as the DUNBAT woke up and broke out of the docking structure, Steve McQueen style.  You’re not entirely sure what to expect.

 

From the gloom you can see a shape take form, preternaturally still and yet getting clearer all the while; not a whale or shark, but a submarine.  As it comes closer, you realize that for all its size and bulk, PATHOS-II’s only deep-sea diving vessel looks an awful lot like a knight’s grilled helmet with arms.  It’s heavily insulated, so even though it looks like it could hold a full crew, you suspect it can hold just a handful of people at most.  The fact that the DUNBAT can withstand ocean pressure as deep as 5000 meters down is why Catherine’s original plan had been to use the DUNBAT to get to the ARK, not the Climber, but looking at it now, you have your doubts about whether that plan would’ve worked any better.

 

The DUNBAT has long, joined arms that end in articulated claspers sticking out its sides.  It’s a maladroit-looking thing, full of sharp planes that angle just enough to form a rough sphere, colored a mix of peeling yellow and grey.  All of it is littered with independently moving electronic devices, lights and cameras and things you cannot name, and bubbles trail it like the ghost of a sigh.

 

You wave, and walk to the very end of the catwalk.  A sheer drop begins just below your feet, but you keep your eyes trained upward, aimed at the DUNBAT as it approaches.  It slows as it nears you, and there’s a moment where you think the vessel has suffered some kind of damage to its navigation systems--- its current trajectory has it hitting the catwalk point blank.  But then it course corrects sharply, elevating fast enough to clear you by at least two meters without knocking into you or the catwalk.  The bottom of its hull draws near, and a trio of red lights draw your gaze to the back of the vessel where a hatch opens just above your head.

 

It’s a stretch, but you crouch down and then spring up high enough to grab hold of the hatch.  Your hands fumble with the slick metal, legs pumping laboriously in the heavy water, before you manage to get a grip on the inner lip of the exposed chamber.  Hauling your body inside, you find yourself tucked into a narrow crawl space: a miniature pressure chamber.  It’s small, and there’s no console for Omnitool use; probably an emergency-use-only kind of thing, then.

 

The hatch swings closed under you and the lock mechanism reverberates loudly in the water.  It doesn’t take long for the chamber to drain, and then the hatch above you swings open.  You climb up and out into the interior of the DUNBAT.

 

Your earlier assessment of the DUNBAT’s holding capacity is spot on: immediately in front of you are four pilot chairs and room for basically nothing else.  A bank of computer terminals wraps around the lower front of the hull and all along the ceiling edges, and the checkerboard windows make a stripe of light from top to bottom.  Gel growths are on almost every surface, black and bulbus, their small blue lights adding to the ambient light provided by the windows, computer screens, and nearly limitless backlit buttons all over the walls and consoles.  There’s signs of disarray--- data tablets on the floor, chords spilling out of a half open computer terminal, a case of mechanic tools haphazardly spread near the back left pilot chair.  The DUNBAT probably presented as a Mockingbird mid-tune up, and nobody had time to clean up before bailing.

 

“Hey Brandon,” you say into the empty hull.  “Thanks for the save.”

 

“You look fucking creepy,” says Brandon.  His voice is coming from the speakers, from all directions at once, and the close quarters of the DUNBAT makes it seem like he’s standing right beside you.

 

“Thanks,” you say dryly.  “You look beautiful, by the way.  Very chic.”

 

“Fuck you,” says Brandon goodnaturedly.  “But seriously, you are  _ eerie _ .  I know you said you’re part corpse, but I guess I wasn’t really expecting it to be true.”

 

“You and me both,” you admit.  “Can I sit down?  Near the window?”

 

“Uh, I guess so?  On the right side, not the left.”

 

You go to the front most right chair and sit down.  It moves smoothly around until you’re facing the window, and you look out.  You haven’t seen more than the Dive Room in so long that the inherent vastness of the ocean seems like an optical illusion.  Like stepping out into it will just reveal a cleverly painted wall.  You remind yourself of how the water felt around you outside, of how the hum of electronics inside the DUNBAT is of a different tempo than Omicron, that there is still that slight static of the comm. link that connects you to and Brandon.  You remind yourself of the world outside your cage, and breathe.

 

“Thanks,” you say again.

 

“Sure, no problem,” says Brandon.  “So I’ve got a question.”

 

“Whose body am I in?’’

 

“No, but now that you bring it up, we’ll have to come back to it,” says Brandon.  “My question is: how do you know the ARK launched?”

 

“Because it did,” you say.

 

“But how do you know?  You weren’t there.  You didn’t get a call from your copy about it, because the communication link between Omicron and Tau is broken, I checked.  So how do you know?”

 

“Because he has to have launched it,” you insist.  “It’s been a week, there’s no way he didn’t.”

 

“Maybe you’re okay with that conviction, but I’m not,” says Brandon.  “That ARK is the last fucking thing we had, and I’m not prepared to just let it rot away in the Abyss.”

 

You’re getting a strong sense of deja vu, and it’s vivid enough to drag up your own memories of Lambda, of talking to Catherine about her pet project and how the apocalypse turned it into the last saving grace of the species, and of you offering so damn quickly to see her project completed.  It’s enough to remind you of how you traversed kilometers of the Atlantic ocean just to complete that project, and how you still didn’t quite manage to do it yourself.

 

It’s enough to remind you that there is the Other You down there, and that Brandon has basically offered you the chance to rescue him up on a silver platter.

 

“There’s one way to make sure the ARK launched,” you say, “and that’s to just go check for ourselves.”

 

“You agree with me?  You’re willing to go down and look?” asks Brandon, and his palpable surprise is a little insulting.

 

“I was always willing, I just don’t have the body for it,” you say sharply.  “But you do.  You can get us both down into the Abyss easily.”

 

“Yeah.  Okay,” says Brandon.  “Down to Tau we go, then.”

 

So far Brandon had just been hovering around the Climber station, mostly stationary but with the structure of Omicron moving in and out of view from the window as the current pushed the DUNBAT around.  Now you hear the kickstart of the engines, the rumble of the machinery getting to work under your body as the DUNBAT starts to move.

 

The world swings out around you, the metal under your body moves like an airplane through the sky, but slower, and you have the irrational fear of dropping into a nosedive, of crash landing on the floor below.  The DUNBAT turns away from the Omicron structure so that the window faces the open water, and then it starts to sink.

 

“This might take a while,” says Brandon.  “I’m not great with this whole darkness thing, and there are some creepy ass animals out there.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Back to what you said earlier, though,” says Brandon, “about whose body you’ve got?  Want to elaborate at all?”

 

“Not really, no.”

 

“Sucks to be you, then.  Spill.”

 

“Uh, okay.”  You shift a little in you seat, looking down at your body and really seeing it for the first time in quite a while.  “This person used to be a woman named Imogen Reed.”

 

“You’re in Reed?  Fucking wild.  But wait, she was stationed at Theta, not Upsilon.  What was she doing there?”

 

“I don’t know,” you say.  “It looked like Upsilon had been evacuated a while ago, there were only two other people still there when I woke up.”

 

“Yeah, they left in April--- wait, two other people?  Who else was there with you?” asks Brandon

 

“They were both dead,” you say quickly, even though Amy was still alive enough to beg you to let her die in the ruins of the Upsilon shuttle terminal.  “Their ID tags said they were Amy Azzaro and Carl Semken.”

 

“Those were the only two officially left at Upsilon, to manage the power generators,” confirms Brandon.  “Damn.  Still doesn’t explain Reed, but, there’s a lot of other mysteries to solve before that one.”

 

“Like what?”   
  


“Like where all this mutated structure gel came from.  Why all these animals are fucked up.  Why I’m in a goddamn submarine and you’re a zombie.  Why the ARK wasn’t fucking launched,” lists Brandon with increasing venom.  “Shit like that.”

 

“Oh,” you say.  “Those mysteries.”

 

You don’t notice right away, but the the color of the view outside starts to change: what used to be blue-green water gets blacker and blacker, lacking enough light that you can’t even be sure you’re not facing rock or the Climber lattice.  Lights on the hull of the DUNBAT have turned on, but the beams only manage to cut through so much darkness before they’re swallowed up by the void.

 

“There were reports of robots acting like people,” says Brandon suddenly.  “People we knew, I mean, people who already existed.  There was a Universal Helper at Lambda that talked like it was Dr. Halperin, and another UH that thought it was Golaski.  They didn’t know they weren’t human, had to be destroyed when the got angry about it.”

 

“I’ve seen a couple of those around, too,” you say.

 

“What I don’t understand,” continues Brandon as if you hadn’t spoken, “is why.  Why do it?  What’s the fucking point of putting real people into robots?  I mean, Halperin and Golaski were still alive when those bots were found--- hell, Golaski even talked to his!  So what was the reason?  Why bring back someone who’s already alive?”

 

“Why bring back someone who was never on the PATHOS-II crew to begin with?” you counter.  Brandon doesn’t say anything.  You sigh.  “I don’t think the WAU is working with the same kind of rationality metric we use.  The way it chose to do its job is fucking psychotic, but that’s just our own judgement of it, not how the WAU would understand it, you know?”

 

“But why?” says Brandon.  “We already had the ARK, why bother putting our copies in robots on Earth when we were going to survive in the stars?”

 

“Well, from what Catherine said, it sounds like the WAU was trying to scan people’s brains before she started the ARK project at all, and that some of the brain scans in the robots are actually those WAU-made scans from early on,” you say.  “I’m pretty sure that all started before the promise of the ARK, and to be honest, I don’t think the WAU actually knew about that plan, anyway.”

 

You don’t realize your mistake until Brandon asks, “ _ Catherine _ said?  What the fuck, I thought you said everyone was dead, how the hell could Catherine say anything to you?”

 

“I found a scan of her, in a robot’s Cortex chip,” you explain.  “I put her in the Omnitool I used to have, and she’s been helping me get to the ARK.”

 

“So she’s down there, too?” says Brandon, his voice loud and harsh through the speakers.  “She failed the first time launching the ARK, and you trusted her to get it right the second time?”

 

“She was the one who made it, I think she knows what she’s doing,” you say.  “Besides, who else was I supposed to ask?  I didn’t even know it existed until she had me to look up its tracking info, and it wasn’t like there was anyone else clamoring to help me out in this place.”

 

“She sent you to the  _ Climber  _ to get to Tau,” points out Brandon.  “That’s the hardest way to get there, and she made you ditch yourself in order to do it.  Did you even see them leave on the Climber?  How do you even know if the copy worked?”

 

“Because I fucking know it worked,” you snap.  “I’m not stupid, I checked the tracking info for the power suit, I know it’s down at Tau.  And the original plan was to take the DUNBAT to Tau, but you know damn well why that option didn’t work.”

 

“What--- fuck.  Fucking hell.”  Brandon’s speakers fuzz out with static, and it hurts your head, makes your optics blur like a TV whose antenna has been knocked askew, like you’re back at the CURIE running from a Flesher.  “Right, right.  I fucking forgot.  Goddamit.  Sorry.  I’m sorry.”

 

“I get it,” you say begrudgingly, but you don’t blame him for getting worked up.  You don’t  _ like  _ it, but you don’t blame him.  You shake your head and say, “I know it sounds sketch, but I trust Catherine to do whatever she has to do to launch the ARK.  If nothing else, I can be sure of that.”

 

Brandon sounds equally begrudging when he says, “Okay.  Fine, so Catherine’s here, too.  The headcount just keeps getting higher, which is probably a good thing.  She and your copy are at Tau, ready to launch the ARK?”

 

“They would’ve launched it by now,” you say.  “But yeah, they’re both at Tau.”

 

“If they launched it already then they’d be gone,” points out Brandon matter-of-factly.

 

“No, they would’ve made copies of themselves before launching, and put those copies onto the ARK,” you say, and the words feel like they’re coming from someone else, someone who hasn’t spent the last two days stressing about this very fact.  “Their physical forms are still at Tau.”

 

“Maybe,” says Brandon.  “ _ Or _ they each put their cortex chips into the ARK and automated the launch sequence so they wouldn’t need a physical presence to do it.”

 

“Oh,” you say, because you didn’t know that was an option.  Did Catherine know that was an option?  Was that her true plan, the way she was going to get you on the ARK?  Could they really both just be . . . gone?  Have you nearly fried your brain worry about people who left you to waste away in the ocean?  Were you purposefully left behind?

 

You zone out for a moment as your headspace spirals, and when you look down at your hands you realize you’re clutching the chair arms tight enough to make your fingers bend awkwardly.  You release your grip and count out each breath until you feel like you can talk through the lump in your (fake) throat.  The ocean is a featureless scroll of vast emptiness in front of you, and it’s still the kindest thing you’ve thought about in a long time.

 

“Uh, Simon?”  Brandon’s voice breaks into your internal meltdown with precision force.  “We’re over halfway there.  In a little bit I can try connecting with Tau’s comm center.”

 

“And if nobody’s there?” you can’t help but ask.

 

“There should be a docking station for the DUNBAT somewhere.  As long as the pressure chamber still works, you should be able to get in and have a look around,” says Brandon.  “Maybe even get to Phi, see if the Space Gun is active.”

 

“Yeah,” you say.

 

Brandon clears his throat.  “Uh, you doing okay there, Simon?  It’s hard to read your biometrics, but I’m pretty sure these fluctuations in power aren’t good signs.”

 

“Biometrics?” you repeat, and then you remember what Catherine said about your body, and all the steps you had to take to make your new one, and you find yourself rattling off what you know about your condition as if you were listing illness symptoms to your doctor.  “Yeah, I think, from what I saw of the scan I took at Theta, that my battery pack charges up the structure gel enough that it simulates a living body.  I think that, when I get too emotional, my electronic parts start to overheat and mess with my senses.  What you’re seeing is probably just those systems trying not to break when the power builds too fast.”

 

“That . . . makes sense,” says Brandon.  “In a crazy, fucked up way.  How is your body even functioning?  It looks like a bunch of organic matter and structure gel held together with an electrical current.”

 

“And wrapped in a diving suit, yeah.  That’s basically it.  Jam a Cortex chip through the spine, and voilá, you get a living brain in a dead body.  Story of my life right here.”

 

“Damn.”  Brandon actually sounds impressed.  “That’s one hell of a story.  They could make a movie out of that.”

 

That startles a laugh out of you, and the phantom tension that had held you rigid in your seat evaporates all at once.  You slump back in the chair and imagine the feel of your lips pulled back, your mouth open in a laugh, your lungs pumping air through your vocal chords.  It’s like you’re actually smiling, when you think about it so vividly, and for a moment you’re thrilled.

 

“Thanks for that.”

 

“Uh, you’re welcome, I guess.  Why was so funny about tha---?  Hang on.”  Brandon cuts himself off abruptly, and you feel the mirth drain away.  “I’ve got a signal.  It’s from Tau.”

 

Oxygen desserts you, so it’s for the best that you don’t really need it.

 

You take a deep breath, anyway.  “What?”

 

“There’s a radio signal from Tau.  I’m accepting the call.  Hello?”

 

The last part is not said to you.  Inside the hull the low thrum of electronic white nose ratchets up a few notches, and there’s a few hiccups as the signal goes in and out of range.  Brandon repeats in a louder voice, “Hello, anyone there?  This is the DUNBAT crew, over.”

 

And then a very familiar male voice says,  _ “Hello?  Who is this?” _

 

“Hey Simon,” you say into the sudden silence of the hull.  You look through the window at the black, black ocean and say, “It’s me.  Simon.”

  
_ “Holy shit.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	15. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon meets Simon

You’re hiding in the Dispatch room when the signal reaches Tau.

 

You’re not technically hiding--- hiding would imply that there is something you are trying to escape from, and you aren’t trying to escape anything, especially not Catherine’s bad mood.  You are just being somewhere else for a while, and if that somewhere else happens to be a cramped room full of faulty computers and structure gel, well, that’s just where you’d rather spend your time.

 

The signal comes in, and at first you think it’s just a malfunction of the system, that the computers are so broken that they are mistaking monsters for relay signals.  And then the signal repeats, and repeats, and you start to think it’s the real deal.

 

You begin fussing with the machines in an attempt to lock onto the signal and make a radio connection.  Even as you think about what to say when you hail the object, it doesn’t quite translate in your head to the reality that  _ there is someone else out there _ .  

 

At least not until a male voice blasts from the mic in you face.  _  “Hello?” _

 

You stare.  Then you roll your chair to the doorway and yell, “Catherine?  You should get over here.”

 

“Not now, Simon,” calls Catherine in a long-suffering tone, “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

 

“Get over here,  _ now _ ,” you insist.

 

_ “Hello, anyone there?  This is the DUNBAT crew, over,” _ says the hailer, loud enough to carry through the whole compound

 

Catherine’s response to you is cut short, and then there’s a clatter of a chair being knocked aside as Catherine comes running to the Dispatch room.  You roll your chair back to the console and press the comm. button.

 

“Hello?” you ask, and there are a lot more questions where that came from, but what leaves your mouth is, “Who is this?”

 

_ “Hey Simon,” _ says an altogether different voice, and you know that voice,  _ you know that voice _ \---  _ “It’s me, Simon.” _

 

“Holy shit,” you say.

 

Catherine comes up behind you and leans down to speak into the mic.  “How did you get here?”

 

_ “I brought us down here,”  _ says the first male voice, and it also sounds familiar, but you’re too busy dealing with the brain-breaking fact that you were technically just talking to yourself.   _ “Hello to you, too, by the way.” _

 

“You said the DUNBAT crew,” presses Catherine.  “What does that mean?”

 

_ “It’s just me and Brandon,” _ says Other You.   _ “But Brandon is a one-man crew anyway.” _

 

“There’s a reason we used the Climber to get here, Simon,” says Catherine carefully, and for a moment you’re confused, because you already know that, so why is she telling you again during a conversation with Brandon and Other--- oh.  She’s not talking to  _ you _ .

 

_ “I know that,” _ says Other You.   _ “Brandon’s cool, he saved me from Omicron.  What you’re thinking of--- it’s not going to be an issue.” _

 

_ “I’m not a fucking Mockingbird, _ ” cuts in Brandon.  _  “I’m stuck in the DUNBAT, but I’m not crazy.  And fuck you, Catherine.” _

 

Catherine jerks away from the mic.  You lean forward and take over the comm.  “What the hell was that for?”

 

_ “Did you even manage to launch the fucking ARK yet, or is that another thing that got cocked up?”  _ says Brandon, as if you didn’t say anything.  He seems to be building himself into a rage, and you’re gearing up to shout back at him, when Other You intervenes.

 

_ “We just need to know: did you launch the ARK?” _

 

“Yes,” you say tersely.  “About five days ago.  It launched safely and got through the atmosphere into low orbit.  They’re all safe, out there.”

 

_ “How did you manage that without going with it?” _ presses Brandon.   _ “Did you want to get on the ARK, Catherine?” _

 

He talks like he’s trying to trap you into giving a wrong answer.  “Catherine made copies of us and put them on the ARK before it launched.  We got left behind.  That’s how this works.”

 

“ _ So the ARK really did launch?” _ asks Brandon.

 

“Yes,” you say.  “We launched the fucking ARK.”

 

_ “Okay,” _ says Other You, and you can almost feel him letting out a long breath, leaning back wherever he is to slump down in relief.  You feel it as if it’s happening to you, and then you realize it is happening, that you’re doing that right now.   _ “Okay, that’s good.” _

 

“Is that why you came down here?” you ask.

 

_ “That was a reason, sure,” _ says Brandon.  _  “But not the only one.  Where is the docking station around here?” _

 

“It’s been flooded,” says Catherine, stepping forward again to answer in a deliberately even tone.  “There’s an emergency tunnel dock at the top of the hallway linking the labs to the bunk rooms.  If you can lock in there, we can start stabilizing the pressure and create and access tunnel that won’t strain your internal equilibrium.”

 

_ “Great, you go ahead and do that,” _ says Brandon with enough bite to his sarcasm that it makes your left wrist hurt.   _ “I’ll just look for this thing I’ve never seen before and dock to it without being able to see where it is, and absolutely nothing bad will happen.” _

 

_ “What side of the compound is it on?” _ asks Other You, in a much more patient tone.

 

You give him directions for the area the emergency dock should be, all the while thinking at a lightyear a minute about how you are  _ talking to yourself _ .  Literally.  You are either the epitome of self indulgence or of self sabotage, and you’re not sure which is worse.

 

While you talk your Other Self and Brandon through the layout of Tau, Catherine leaves to mess around with the computers in the main room, but she comes back with a data tablet just as Other You says they’ve spotted the tunnel access port.

 

“Great,” says Catherine, leaning down to share the mic with you.  “I’ve got the Omnitool logged in and ready to start the stabilization process.  We can put it on a timer, so that nobody has to stay behind to reverse the process and allow you to detach.”

 

_ “Super,” _ says Brandon.

 

_ “Thanks,” _ says Other You.  _  “If you have any extra Omnitools, bring them with you.  And any other supplies you’ve got would be nice, too.” _

 

“Of course,” says Catherine.  “We have a lot of saved data to bring, as well as some maintenance supplies.  It’s not a lot, though.”

 

_ “Just bring what you can,” _ says Other You.  _  “There’s not a ton of space in here anyway.” _

 

You release the comm. button and get up.  “You stay and talk to them, I’m going to round up the stun batons and data records and notes and stuff.”

 

“But I know which---”

 

“I’ll just pack all of them,” you say, moving her around to seat her in the chair, and conveniently put you closer to the door.  “I just need to--- I’m just going to go do that.  Stuff.  I’ll be back.”

 

“Simon---”

 

You duck out of the room and go straight to the empty corner behind the infirmary ladder, and breathe.  You can’t keep talking to yourself.  You can’t keep hearing your voice and getting confused because your mouth’s not open, except you  _ don’t have a mouth  _ and  _ maybe it really is you talking _ and---

 

You need a break.  So you start collecting up all the essentials, and some of the not-so-essentials.  You grab one of the plastic cases of Ross’ and start piling data tablets, paper notes, audio recordings, maps, schematics, the extra Tool chips, the few working Omnitools and stun batons, and storage chip inside the case.  When you run out of room, you just commandeer another plastic case and keep going, all the while trying not to listen in too hard on the conversation going on in the Dispatch room.

 

When Catherine emerges, you’ve just started to accept that there’s nothing else for you to get and are just standing awkwardly on the other side of the table.  She eyes the two messily-filled cases with a displeasure you can almost feel, and then she looks at you.

 

“We’re all set.  They’re docked and ready, we just need to open the hatch and climb up.”

 

“How do we want to do this?  Each of us take a case and enters one at a time?”

 

“No offense, but I think I should take both cases up first,” says Catherine.  “We need to climb straight up a ladder, and I don’t remember how cramped the emergency chamber is in the DUNBAT.  I can handle a case and a ladder at the same time, but it might be more trouble than it’s worth for you.”

 

You pretend like that’s not a lethal blow to your pride and nod.  “Okay, we’ll do that, then.  Where’s the hatch?”

 

“I’ll show you, but first: do we have everything?” asks Catherine.  She does a quick circuit around the room like a suspicious parent, looking through each former hiding place of data and supplies you already rounded up, before returning to pack her data tablet and grab a case.  She can’t see you roll your eyes, but you hope your dramatic head tilt conveyed it well enough  “Okay, let’s go.”

 

You follow Catherine out of the common room to the broken ladder, then up to the L-shaped walkway that would lead you down into the labs.  Catherine stops about halfway before the bend, where a ladder has appeared, descended from an open hole in the ceiling.

 

“Has this been here the whole time?”

 

“It’s only accessible for the site manager, usually,” says Catherine.  “If I hadn’t spent time as a computer, we wouldn’t have been able to deploy it at all.  For now, all we have to do is move fast and leave behind an Omnitool, which is a small price to pay for getting the hell out of the Abyss.”

 

“Wait, so we don’t have the good Omnitool---  _ your  _ Omnitool--- anymore?” you say.

 

“It’s a small price, Simon,” says Catherine.  She starts to climb the ladder, one hand on the rungs and the other around the case handle.  You twist around to watch her ascend, a series of portholes opening up as she goes.  For a while you expect there to be an endless series of doors, each one leading her further and further away without any promise of an end, but the fourth hatch swings up and you see a red glowing eyes in a dark helmet peering down.

 

Your voice carries pretty well, so you can hear him just fine as he says, “Welcome aboard.”

 

“Thanks, Simon,” says Catherine after a barely-there pause.  “We have one more case to get, and then we’ll close up the hatches.  Hang on.”

 

She descends, coming down the ladder just low enough to take the other case from you.  “Ready?” she asks.

 

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” you say.  “Let’s go.”

 

Catherine nods, and starts climbing.  You wait until she’s far enough along before you follow, hauling yourself up in the same awkward fashion Catherine is, except you’re not maneuvering a plastic suitcase through a narrow tunnel.  Catherine reaches the top and climbs out, and then you are at the top and climbing out.  And then you are in the DUNBAT.

 

The interior is rather cramped compared to what you imagined, but you’re probably perceiving it as smaller than it is simply because you are now within arm’s length of your Other Self.  You are arrested by the sight of him, your image of him as he is now superimposed upon your last memory of him seated in the Pilot Seat at Omicron.  He’s not sleeping now, not waiting passively for you to decide what to do with him, and most importantly, he’s  _ talking _ .

 

“What happened to your hand?”

 

“Oh.  Uh,” you look stupidly down at your left stump, the black shell of structure gel holding together the tattered remains of your arm.  “The monster in Tau kind of ate it.”

 

“You were caught by one of the monsters?  How did you not get killed?  Or put in that Lotus Eater Machine thing?” asks Other You incredulously.

 

“Cut the chit chat for a sec, the timer’s running out and I need to think,” interrupts Brandon, his voice coming from everywhere at once.  The hatch behind you swings shut, and you hear a low groan of metal parts shifting under rapidly-changing pressure.  There’s muted noise coming from below, and you watch as the front window view of black metal is traded out black water.  “Okay, we’re not linked to Tau anymore.  Hope you didn’t forget anything.”

 

“We’ve got what we need,” says Catherine.  “And to answer your previous question, I shot it with a stun baton until it let go.  We brought some batons along with us, since they’re so handy.”

  
“Thanks, but that brings up another question I have,” says Other You with forced calm.  He points at Catherine and asks, “Why the  _ hell  _ are you a body now?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	16. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon tries to get along with himself. It doesn't go well.

“The Omnitool broke,” you tell him, before Catherine can say a word, “so I improvised.”

 

“You ‘improvised’?” echoes Other You.  “Building a body is not improvising, that’s a goddamn  _ commitment _ .  And you just said you had an Omnitool.  You used it to open the emergency tunnel.”

 

“Yeah, well, it took a while to find a new one, and Phi didn’t exactly have a lot of extra supplies hanging around.  I didn’t think I had any other options,” you snap.

 

“But you had enough supplies to build a body?” says Other You.  “Where did you even get that body?  Or the gel or the battery or the Pilot Seat?  You had all of that at your disposal, but no Omnitool?”

 

“There’s dead people all over the goddamn place, you know that!”  You feel like pacing, like punching the wall, but you can’t decide which so you end up doing neither.  “I didn’t even need a Pilot Seat, I just used her Cortex chip instead of a blank one.  It’s not that fucking hard, you should know that, it was the last fucking thing you did!”

 

Other You rears back as if he'd be slapped.  His voice is deliberately chilled, sharp as a blade saw.  “Oh,  _ fuck you _ .”

 

“Wait, so you didn’t need a pilot seat to transfer her brain?” asks Brandon, cutting in on what was about to become a slap down fight.  “You just moved her Cortex chip from one place to another?”

 

You take two deep breaths before you feel like you can answer at a normal volume.  “Yeah.  Yes, that’s what I did.”

 

“So body swapping is a thing?”

 

“Basically.”

 

“What are you getting at, Brandon?” asks Catherine with much more uneasiness than you think is warranted.

 

Until Brandon says, “So you could transfer me into a body like your guys’, right?”

 

“Uh,” you say.

 

“We don’t know where your Cortex chip is,” says Catherine, “and it’s possible that trying to dislodge it will either damage the chip or cause you a lot of pain, or both.  Transferring would be very difficult.”

 

“But possible.”

 

“Theoretically---”

 

“It’s  _ possible _ ,” says Brandon loudly, “that you could take me out of the DUNBAT and put me in a human-shaped body like the rest of you.”

 

“Sounds feasible,” says Other You, because obviously he’s decided to become the  _ bane of your fucking existence _ .  “We need to find a body in a dive suit, though.”

 

“I know a body we can---” starts Catherine.

 

“ _ No _ .”  You grab Catherine’s arm and turn her to face you.  “No, you can’t do that.  I thought we talked about this, you said you agreed.”

 

“I said I’d deal with it, not that I agreed,” corrects Catherine icily.  “Besides, Brandon clearly wants a body more than I do, and we don’t even have to waste time constructing one.  This one already works, it’s perfectly ready to be used.”

 

“It’s  _ your _ body,” you stress.  She glares and you tighten your grip, and this could easily turn into another fight, a shouting match just like all the others you’ve had over the past week about this same fucking topic.  You shake her a little, angry but willing to compromise if it means she won’t push it, and say, “We’ll get a different body for him, okay?  There are plenty of headless people at Omicron, and some of them were even in diving suits already.  It’s not as big a deal as you think it is.”

 

“What about getting his Cortex chip out?” asks Other You.  “Are there any schematics of the DUNBAT at Theta that would have that information?”

 

“Of course,” says Catherine, visibly rallying herself.  She shakes you off and steps away, turns her focus onto Other You.  “There should be a building plan for where the Cortex chip is, and there’s even the equipment of my lab where we can do repairs if anything goes wrong.”

 

“So we go to Omicron, and then Theta for what we need,” says Brandon, like you’ve just agreed on a shopping list and not on Frankenstein-ing a body.  “Getting into Omicron’s going to be a bitch, though.  I triggered the evacuation protocol, so all of it’s going to be in a worse version of lockdown.  Hope you brought at least one working Omnitool.”

 

“We’ve got two Omnitools, and they should even have pretty good clearance,” says Catherine.

 

“Why did you activate the evacuation protocol?” you ask.

 

“Well, since you left me locked in a room with no way out, we had to  _ actually _ improvise,” says Other You snidely.

 

“Oh,” you say.  “Right.”

 

Other You, who for the majority of this conversation has been hovering near the front windows and talking to you over the expanse of the hull, suddenly crosses the distance to get right up in your face.  This close you can see the half jaw of Reed and the flat planes of metal that meet to form the light holes for Other You’s eyes.  You can feel the heat radiating off of him, feel the vibration of his voice between his helmet and yours.  The inhumanity and familiarity of it is enough to leave you dumbstruck.

 

“ _ ‘Oh _ ’?” he says, and you feel the weight of that word as if it were made of stone.  “Is that all you have to say,  _ ‘oh’? _  You leave me behind, you leave me to exist forever  _ alone _ , and that’s all you can say?  Are you fucking kidding me right now?”

 

“Back off,” you say, shoving his shoulder away with your good arm.  Other You  stumbles back but then steps close again, undeterred.  “Seriously, back the fuck off.”

 

“Simon, please, we weren’t trying to hurt you,” says Catherine.  “You knew we had to keep going.  We had to get the ARK launched, and we were running out of time.”

 

“We have all the time in the fucking world, and you couldn’t take two seconds out of that to let me die in my sleep?”  Other You reorients his attention onto Catherine, stepping in to crowd her against the wall.  “You let me wake up in that locked room, and you think that was a kindness?  You think it was any better to leave me there alive than to kill me?”

 

“I’m sorry we left you behind, but we weren’t trying to hurt you,” you say, grabbing for his arm to pull him away from Catherine.  “We were going to contact you afterward, we were going---”   
  


“Contact me?” repeats Other You, eyes boring holes into yours.  “You  _ knew? _  You knew I was alive up there?”

 

“I---”

 

“You knew this whole time.  It was  _ your  _ decision, wasn’t it, to leave me like that,” says Other You, and the edge of panic and fury that slices each word is like battery acid in your ears.  “What the fuck, you couldn’t do me one fucking courtesy and pull the plug?  It wasn’t like Catherine didn’t set it up on a silver fucking platter for you or anything, that would make it too  _ easy _ .”

 

“I’m not a murderer!” you say, shouting to be heard over Other You’s tirade.

 

“No, you’re just a fucking coward,” says Other You with equal venom.  “You couldn’t stand the thought of being the last one on this godforsaken earth, so you made sure that at least someone else had it worse off than you, didn’t you.  Do you feel better?  Do you feel good knowing I was going have a worse existence than you?”

 

You punch him.  You pull it, but your right fist collides with the frame of his diving helmet and knocks it askew, snaps his head back at a bad angle.  He stumbles backwards, his voice glitching as he yells in surprise.  He ends up falling into one of the piloting chairs, both hands gripping his helmet.

 

“F-fuck yu-you,” garbles Other You as he tries to resettle his helmet.

 

“Please don’t hurt each other,” says Catherine, a beat too late.

 

“If you start a fight I will barrel roll this bitch,” says Brandon, and the hull tips ominously to the side.  (You notice that it tips in a direction that lets Other You stay comfortably in his chair.)  “I fucking mean it.”

 

“It doesn’t even matter.  It doesn't even  _ fucking  _ matter anymore,” you grit out.  You shake out your fist, watching Other You for signs of retaliation.  “It doesn’t matter, because we’re all together now.  We are all literally in the same boat, and getting into a fight over the past isn’t going to help us at all.”

 

“Go to hell,” snarls Other You in his normal voice.

 

“We’re already there,” you snipe back.

 

“Simon, please---” starts Catherine.

 

“What?” both you and Other You say in tandem.  You glare at each other, and Other You puts his hands on the armrests as if he’s going to launch himself at you for another round of fisticufs.  The hull tips again, rocking Other You back into his chair, while you and Catherine have to clutch at the walls to stay upright.

 

“I think we need to work on names, before this whole situation gets any worse,” says Brandon.  “We obviously can’t use ‘Simon’.”

 

“Fine, he can be Lefty Simon and I can be Real Simon,” says Other You.

 

“What?  Hell no, you don’t get to be Real Simon,” you say.  “ _ I’m _ the real Simon.”

 

“Great come back, very convincing,” mocks Other You.

 

Catherine holds her hands up in a placating gesture.  “Brandon’s right, we can’t use Simon as an identifier anymore.  Are there any other names we can call you by?  Middle names, surnames, nicknames?”

 

“I don’t have a middle name,” says Other You.

 

“ _ We _ don’t have a middle name,” you correct.

 

“Can we just go with that hand thing?” says Brandon.  “One of you is Righty and the other is Lefty?”

 

“I should be Righty because I have my right hand still, and because I’m right all the time,” you say.

 

“Bullshit, you should be called Lefty because you  _ don’t  _ have your left hand, and  _ I’m _ right all the time,” says Other You.

 

“No, we should call you gremlin, because you’re made of glowy gel-mud and have no fucking soul,” you say.

 

“That’s golems, not gremlins, you idiot!  Golems are made of earth and magic, and also, fuck you,” says Other You.

 

“I know it’s golems, okay, I just said the wrong word,” you snap.  “And fuck you, too!”

 

“Will you both just shut up?” shouts Catherine.  Her voice rings in the air, rendering both of you silent.  She looks at the pair of you, and then points at the pilot chairs up front.  “Everybody just sit down and be quiet.  We’re not going to get anywhere with all this shouting.”

 

Reluctantly you take a seat by the front window, the furthest possible seat from Other You.  Catherine takes the chair next to you, and faces Other You with her hands on her knees.  She lets the both of you take several deep breaths before she speaks.

 

“I get that this is a really difficult situation to deal with, but yelling about it and hurting each other isn’t going to help.  Now, either you can pick your own names or you can let someone else pick them, but neither of you can use Simon.  It’s not fair, and it will just be too confusing.”  Catherine looks between the two of you again and asks, “Do you both understand?”

 

“Yeah, okay,” you both say.  You glare at him, and he glares back.

 

Catherine sighs.  “Okay.  What names do you want to use?”

 

“He should be called Lefty,” says Other You immediately.

 

“We’re picking our own names, idiot,” you say.

 

“Yeah, well, yours should be Lefty.”

 

“And yours should be Gremlin, but you don’t see me forcing the issue,” you say.

 

“The word you’re looking for is golem, we literally just went over this!”

 

“You know what, fine,” says Catherine in a burst of frustration.  “Your names are Lefty and Gremlin.  Final decision.”

 

“Wait a second---”

 

“No, you can’t---”

 

“ _ Final.  Decision. _  Neither of you are cooperating, so until you can make this decision cogently and considerately, we’re going to call you Lefty and Gremlin,” says Catherine over the din of your protests.  She stands up and goes to get the plastic cases full of Tau’s data.  “Now, I’m going to organize these cases, and you two are going to be nice to each other and not say anything mean or hit anyone for the rest of the trip.”

 

“This is going to be a silent ride,” mutters Gremlin.

 

“But not a long one,” says Brandon.  “We’re outside Omicron in three, two---”

 

You swing the chair around just in time to see the hulking mass of Omicron materialize out of the rock and water, the whole of it completely unfamiliar but still known to you, the last base on the Plateau.

  
“--- One.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	17. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gremlin does his best at Hard Mode Scavenger Hunt.

Omicron looks as dim and run down as you remember it, but luckily you don’t have to muck about inside it hunting for bodies.

 

“I don’t want to test the security setting right now,” says Catherine, “so if we can find a body at Theta, that would be ideal.”

 

“What about the evacuation party?” you say.  “The one that got locked out.”

 

“There was a body in a diving suit by the front door of Omicron.  We could just take that one,” says Lefty, agreeing without actually looking at you or acknowledging you in any way.

 

“How?” asks Catherine.  “The pressure hatch for the DUNBAT can only fit one person at a time, and a dead body is going to be difficult enough to maneuver around the water, let alone trying to yank it in and out of a pressure chamber.”

 

“Hang on, I think I have a solution to that,” says Brandon.

 

The claw grips anchored to the DUNBAT’s sides turn out to be far more functional than you anticipated.  Brandon is able to grab hold of the body outside Omicron’s door and lift it in both mechanical hands without causing any damage to the body (though it does leave huge gauges in the sand, but the point is that the body is usable, and that’s all that counts.)

 

Theta isn’t that far from Omicron, and Catherine uses the trip to distribute the goods she and Lefty brought with them from Tau.  She even manages to fix the bashed up Omnitool you took from Omicron, which is its own victory.  Everything is lining up so nicely, with the unusually good condition of the dock for the DUNBAT to top it off, that you’re blindsided by the roadblock of how to get the body out of Brandon’s grip and onto the hangar floor.

 

“Just move your arm out and set it down,” says Lefty irritably for the tenth time.

 

“I can’t, I told you, the joints don’t work like that,” snaps Brandon.

 

“You can try tossing it in front of you,” you say.  “You’re high enough up, you could get it over the fence and onto the hangar floor.”

 

“But what if I break it?” asks Brandon.

 

“Doesn’t matter, the structure gel we put into it will hold everything together no matter what,” says Lefty.  “Just don’t tear the suit.”

 

“That seems a little hard to do when I’m _tossing it over a fence,_ ” points out Brandon.

 

Catherine, who’s been hanging back for most of the argument, finally pipes up.  “What if we moved that staircase over to the front, and you just handed the body over?  That way it doesn’t have any chance of breaking.”

 

“We could probably do that,” says Lefty.

 

“I think this job might require more than one hand per person,” you say.  “Maybe you should just sit this one out.”

 

Lefty glares as much as he can with LED eyes.  “Oh, go fuck yourself with a chainsaw.”

 

“Come on now, try to be---” starts Catherine.

 

Brandon cuts in with feigned nonchalance.  “Sure, he can be the one to stay.  One of you has to, anyway.”

 

“What are you talking about?” you ask.

 

“I’m not going to let all of you just waltz out of here and leave me immobile in the hangar.  That would be stupid,” says Brandon.  “One of you stays inside, so that if you try to quarantine me again, you’ll have to trap on of you in here to do it.”

 

“Are you sure that’s good leverage?  I mean, look at their history,” you say.  “I don’t know that I’d make that bet.”

 

“We’re not going to put you in quarantine,” says Catherine calmly.

 

“We’re not going to _trap_ anyone,” insists Lefty.

 

“Sure, I totally believe that, what reason would I ever have to doubt you,” you say in your blandest voice.  There’s a real anger still banked down in you about that betrayal, though, so instead of starting another fist fight, you force yourself to refocus on Brandon.  “I agree with leaving Lefty.  I’ve got the hands and Catherine has the brains, so we can get you transferred to a new body without his help.”

 

“Great, it’s settled. I’ll get the door,” says Brandon.  A slab of metal depresses from the hull, and then swings open on it’s hinges.  “Make it quick.”

 

“You got it,” you say, and step outside the DUNBAT.  Catherine follows right behind you, and the door shuts fast enough to almost clip her, sealing Lefty inside.

 

Catherine rounds on you, and says in a tone that you’d almost call warning if it weren’t for the tremble in it, “We’re not going to leave them--- _either_ of them--- like this.”

 

“Of course not,” you say, heading for the stairs.  “I’m not going to ditch Brandon like that.”

 

_“Thanks,”_ says Brandon, voice emanating from a speaker at the front of the DUNBAT.

 

Catherine hesitates for a long time at the top of the rafter before following you down the stairs.  She doesn’t say anything, but you don’t think there’s anything she could say that wouldn’t piss you off right now, so at least you weren't lying about her being the brains.

 

At the base of the stairs you unholster your new stun baton, one of the many goodies distributed from the Tau supplies, and hold at the ready as you approach the hangar door.

 

The power outage that had accompanied Brandon’s first jail break from Theta a week ago has since been fixed, although you don’t know how.  It’s great because it means the hangar door leading to the main compound is open, but bad because you don’t know if the return of power has allowed the Proxies to leave the basement floors.  You’ve got to keep your guard up, in case Ackers decides to go for round two.

 

Catherine also has a stun baton, but she keeps her hands free so she can go to the movable staircase by the corner vent.  You check just outside the door and then, when it’s clear nothing is hanging around to cause problems, you go back to help her.

 

_“Lemme know when you’re ready,”_ says Brandon, his voice weirdly small and echoing in the hangar.  He lifts his claw grips up above the fence, dead body cradled in the metal like a grotesque pieta. _“Any day now.”_

 

“Okay, okay,” you say, and both you and Catherine get up on the top platform, which puts you about level with the claw grips.  “Alright, we’re ready.  Hand it over.”

 

“Carefully,” adds Catherine.

 

_“I know,”_ says Brandon, as he extends his arms out far enough for you and Catherine to reach for the body.  You grab the torso and head while Catherine grabs the legs, and together you haul the soaking hunk of dead weight off the DUNBAT’s claws.

 

“Jesus, that’s disgusting,” you say, looking down at the rotted corpse in your arms.  “It’s a good thing I can’t smell anymore.”

 

“Glad to know you can still see the silver lining,” says Catherine.

 

“Ha ha,” you say.

 

You are closest to the stairs, so you step down first, backwards and awkward.  The body is slippery from months on the ocean floor, and there’s all manner of things oozing out of the folds and open pockets of the suit.  Despite every physical comedy skit you’ve ever seen, you somehow manage not to pratfall your way down the stairs or drop the body or somehow end up slipping on a banana peel.  Lucky you.

 

Once you and Catherine are both on the same level, you shuffle your way to the side of the room and lean the body against the wall beneath the control room window.  You and Catherine both step away from it immediately, and share an awkward look.

 

“Okay, one ingredient down,” you say.

 

“Now we just have to get the rest of them,” finishes Catherine.  “Come on, the control room has a map we can use to find what we need.”

 

You leave the hanger to enter the room directly next door: the control room.  This is where you plugged Catherine in her Omnitool before, and where she stayed while you went exploring the first time you were here.  Now she enters as a full person, her hands manipulating the computer controls instead of her circuits.  A different Omnitool is plugged into the mainframe but Catherine is still the one to find what you need.  You’re getting that deja vu feeling, that memory reel dropping in front of your eyes like a theater curtain, but you can’t succumb to that now--- you have to stay _present_ , so you shake it off before it drags you down.

 

“Okay, it looks like we can find most of what we need back at my lab,” says Catherine.  “We can get structure gel from basically anywhere, so that’s no issue.  The only problem I can see would be the battery.  If there isn’t a charged one in my lab or the living quarters, we’ll have to go down to the lower admin rooms.”

 

“Let’s try to avoid that,” you say, thinking of Ackers and his Proxies.  “Your lab first?”

 

“My lab first,” confirms Catherine.  She does something to the computer, and then says, “I set up the intercom to let you talk to us throughout the main level of Theta, Brandon.  If we change levels we’ll let you know.”

 

“We’re going to do our best _not_ to go downstairs, though,” you say quickly.

 

_“Got it,”_ says Brandon, and this time you hear him through the speakers at the corner of the room.   _“Keep talking, though, so I can keep track of you.”_

 

“We can do that,” you say, “since we have so much to catch up on.  Haven’t talked in ages.  I’m sure she has plenty to say.”

 

Catherine is ahead of you, already out of the room and headed straight for the door that leads up to her laboratory.  She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even have her stun baton out, but she still opens the door like there’s nothing that could possibly be behind it, and you hurry to catch up with her.

 

The hallway turns out to be empty, but you unholster your own baton out just in case.  “Do you mind exercising a little more caution?” you say anyway, tailing Catherine like a duckling.  “You may not care much about your body but I’d rather keep mine in working order.”

 

“The Proxies have no reason to be on this level,” says Catherine.  “Their whole purpose was to collect living humans, and there haven’t been any here for quite a while.  Besides, the elevator is still busted, and they never bothered using any of the staircases.  They obviously aren’t trying too hard to get up here.”

 

“There was that one Proxy haunting the staff rooms,” you point out.

 

“Outlier,” says Catherine dismissively, and keeps walking.

 

There are no stairs, but the hall coasts up and away from the main floor, with a fourway crossroads in the middle.  One way leads to a storage room, the straight path leads to the dorms, and the right hand hall is the one Catherine takes to go up to her lab.  The door is still open and the lights on, but the brain scan room and AR room seem otherwise undisturbed.

 

It’s dark up here, with only a few dull overhead lights and the eye-searing beam of blue that spills out of the brain scan storage unit at the back of the AR room.  Computers are everywhere, machinery and hardware spread out like someone picked up the rooms and gave them a good shake; a lot like the interior of the DUNBAT, actually.  In the brain scan room there is a modified Pilot Seat, and hanging from the ceiling in front of it is a deactivated robot; the second you walk in, Catherine beelines for that robot.

 

“We can take the Occu-touch and Data Reader from this UH to use as the new interface,” explains Catherine as she pries open the casing of the bot’s rear cavity.  “There should be a bucket in the bathroom of the common area, and we can use that to collect structure gel.  I’ll check the storage rooms here for a battery, if you’ll go get the gel.”

 

“Okay,” you say, and head back out.

 

Unlike the rest of the main level, the lights of the common room flicker, and it messes with your optics enough to make it seem like it’s a strobe light rather than a basic overhead lamp.  Combined with your surroundings--- scattered belongings, ratty couches, the busted elevator door--- you might as well be in a low-budget slasher flick.  There’s a tangled mess of structure gel-mutated machinery spilling out of the vent opening across the room, and it’s just as gross and glowing as it was before, but you’re glad to see that it hasn’t gotten bigger.  The rest of the room is mostly unchanged, but you don't let your guard down just yet.

 

You don’t find a bucket, but you _do_ find a trash bin, which you figure will work just as well.  You pry the lid off and dump the small amount of trash still inside (and you’re glad all over again that you don’t have a nose anymore) before taking it to the gel growth on the other side of the room and setting it down directly under the main bulb.  And then you falter.

 

“Wait, how do I drain it?” you wonder aloud.

 

_“Drain what?”_ asks Brandon from the intercom.

 

“The structure gel growths, they’re kind of . . . shell-like,” you say.  “I don’t know what she meant by draining them.”

 

_“Lefty-guy says that you have to stab it,”_ says Brandon.   _“Apparently it’s like popping a zit--- ew, no, why would you tell me that?  Now I have that image in my head, ugh.”_

 

“Stab it, huh?”  Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like anyone left a pocket knife lying around for your convenience.  But you just so happen to know where you can find a blade nearby.

 

Down the hall are some of the staff living quarters, and one of those rooms used to belong to Robin Bass.  You know about Bass because you met her as a robot outside of Theta eons ago, but you also know about her because you went into her room.  The same room she committed suicide in by slitting her wrists with a knife.

 

The knife is still there.  It’s tangled in the bloody bedsheets on the floor, but it’s still there.  You take it back to the common room, set up to the gel growth, and sink the blade in up to the hilt.  It takes some force to really get it in, and you have to put a rather embarrassing amount of weight behind it, but you manage.  Then you yank the blade free, and let the gel come pouring out of the breech.  You get maybe half of a trash bin full of gel before the flow constricts to just a few dribbles.

 

“Hey, how much gel do we need?” you ask, hopefully loud enough so that even Catherine can hear you.

 

Brandon’s the one that answers.   _“He said a standard bucket was enough, but more is better.”_

 

“How about almost-half a trash can?”

 

_“He says get more,”_ relays Brandon.

 

You drag the trash bin out to the back stairs, located on the other side of the common room’s back wall, which are completely clogged with structure gel, pipes, and other infected machinery.  Again you stab the growths and again you let the gel pour into the bin, but this time you get almost to the edge of the lid before you have to drag the whole thing away, and the gel is still flowing.  It pools on the concrete like fresh blood, and you hurry to clear the splash zone before it can stick to you.

 

“Hope this is enough,” you say, and start to slowly drag the trash bin of gel back to the DUNBAT hangar.

 

Along the way you stop at Catherine’s lab.  “Hey,” you say, ducking into the AR simulator room where Catherine is looking through a case full of what look like Tool chips, but larger.  “Any luck in here?”

 

“Data Reader and Occu-Touch are in good condition and ready to go,” says Catherine without looking up from her task.  Part of you still balks at thinking of her as a person, and it isn’t made easier by the fact that she and Lefty are basically identical.  The only difference is in their voices.  “Battery is a no-show.  Not sure if we might find one in one of the staff rooms or if we need to venture down.”

 

“Look through the staff rooms first,” you say.  “I’ll take the stuff we already have to the hangar, and then we’ll figure out what to do.”

 

Catherine hums acknowledgement, but continues working as if uninterrupted.  You take the necessary robot parts from the desk she left them on, and return to dragging the gel to the hangar.

 

“Why the fuck is structure gel so heavy?” you grumble as you carefully maneuver the bin down the short flight of stairs between the hall door and the main entrance room of Theta.  “Is this why it’s such a pain in the ass to swim?”

 

_“You think that’s heavy, try being a submarine,”_ says Brandon.

 

“Touché,” you say.  You drag the bin into the hangar, and leave it as close to the body against the wall as you feel like lugging it, and then give up before resting against the wall yourself, your fake breathing labored from your perceived work out.  “Bad news.  We might have to go downstairs.”

 

_“What’s so bad about downstairs?”_ asks Brandon.

 

“Proxies,” you say, which you realize isn’t very helpful to a guy whose brain scan was taken before the horror of Ackers’ gel-induced insanity.  Trying to explain anything regarding the WAU is hard, but you give it a shot.  “They’re monsters created by the WAU using structure gel and humans.  They look creepy as hell and are not above attacking you and mangling you to get you hooked up to the fleshy life support system the WAU set up.  I mean, it doesn’t really work on me because the body I’m in is dead already, but that doesn’t stop them from trying.  The main concern is that they’re mean and drenched in electromagnetism, which fucks with my robot brian and makes it hard for me to move and think.”

 

_“Well that’s shitty,”_ says Brandon.   _“How did that even happen?  Where did these things come from?”_

 

“Not sure,” you say, which is only kind of a lie.  “But I’d like it if they’d just leave.”

 

_“Check my room, there should be a modified stun baton there,”_ says Brandon suddenly. _“It’s strong enough to incapacitate a Kodiak, so it should be strong enough to take down those monsters.”_

 

“Really?  Awesome,” you say, getting up.  “Thanks, Brandon.”

 

_“No problem.  Just come back with my battery, okay?”_

 

“Deal.”

 

You go back to the living quarters, where you stop just outside Brandon’s door because across the hall you can see the shadow of Catherine standing in the center of her old room, holding her stuffed bear Toby.  You’re not willing to intrude--- you’re still pissed at her, but you’re not a complete asshole--- so you duck as quietly as you can into Brandon’s room without saying anything.

 

It’s unlocked, because you’ve been here before, and also you have a terrible track record with closing doors.   You ransacked his room the last time you were in Theta, looking for anything you could use to trick his ARK brain scan into divulging the security cypher Catherine needed to release the DUNBAT.  Everything from his emails to his private letters to his family photos--- you went through everything.

 

Yet somehow you missed a stun baton. But as you search it becomes pretty obvious that Brandon fashioned a false bottom to his bedside table, and that if you hadn’t been in such a rush to crack the code and get the hell out of dodge, you’d have found the most souped-up stun baton you’ve ever seen.

 

“Damn,” you say, awed.  “This is awesome.”

 

_“Thanks,”_ says Brandon proudly.   _“Modded it myself.  Delta was a pretty open-water operation, and sometimes we’d get big creatures too stupid to stay away.  And then the gel started infecting the wildlife, and we started getting suicidal creatures that wouldn’t stay away, period.  It came in handy to have a weapon that could One-Hit KO a fanatic shark.”_

 

“Great, we can use it to subdue any Proxies we come across when we go downstairs,” says Catherine crisply, appearing in the doorway with a stolen data tablet and the polar opposite attitude of someone who was just communing with their childhood toy.  “I checked the other rooms and it’s a bust.  But I did find Strohmeier's inventory list, and it looks like he kept a stash of lithium-sulfur batteries in his office as back ups.  We can find what we need there.”

 

“Dammit,” you say.  You really, _really_ didn’t want to go downstairs.

 

“From what I can see, the stairways are all blocked by gel mutations,” continues Catherine, tapping her data tablet.  “And the elevator is stuck between the admin and maintenance levels, so I don’t think we can use that.  How did you get to the admin level before?”

 

“I crawled through the vent in the hangar,” you say.  “Came out inside the Project Hub, where you found the ARK prototype.”

 

“Well, it worked once, why not twice?”

 

_“Am I able to talk to you down there?”_ asks Brandon. _“It looks like there’s been a huge power outage recently, and only some things have come back online.  The speakers might not work on the other levels.”_

 

“I guess we’ll find out.”  Catherine lowers her tablet and finally looks at you.  “Ready to go?”

  
“Fine,” you say, holstering your new, amazing stun baton, “let’s just get this over with.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	18. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gremlin and Catherine go downstairs.

Getting to the vent is easy--- you just move the rolling staircase back to the hangar corner and climb up--- and the trip through the vents to the opening in the main room downstairs is unobstructed, although there’s a slight hiccup when you both realize that Catherine’s suit is big enough to make getting through the vents a bit of a tight squeeze.  You go first, and are quick to get your stun baton ready when you arrive at the Hub; Catherine is less quick, instead clambering out of the vent and onto the floor with the kind of grace you’d expect from a duck.  You’re a nice enough person to not to laugh out loud.

 

The Project Hub is an hectagonal room painted white and orange, tall and open, with lights and piping drooping from the ceiling.  While expansive, the room is sparsely populated with computers and machinery as compared to Catherine’s lab upstairs, with only a few modems and machines against the walls, a cluttered white board and lone work table dominating the center.  Crouched in one corner like a hulking bear is the Compound Examiner, meant to determine the structural integrity of cargo, but used most recently to scan your body and determine what makes you tick.  The lights are still on in this room, but past the decontamination chamber you can see that the rest of the level is without power.

 

“This is where I must’ve developed the ARK container with Sarah and Alice,” says Catherine quietly.  She’s still standing where she landed coming out of the vent, head swiveling around to look at everything at once.  “This is the last place in Theta I remember being in, before you and I left.”

 

“Lucky you,” you say.

 

 _“Testing, can you hear me?”_ says Brandon over the intercom.

 

“Yeah, we can hear you just fine,” you tell him.

 

 _“Hello?”_ says Brandon, louder.

 

“Looks like the audio system is down for the count,” says Catherine.  She unhooks her stun baton and hefts it in her arms.  “How many Proxies are down here?”

 

“One, but Ackers is relentless and probably still pissed that he couldn’t keep me trapped in his stupid Lotus Eater Machine.  You’ll know he’s coming because your vision will fritz and your brain will hurt.”

 

Catherine shakes her head.  “Right.  If I remember correctly, Strohmeier's office is between Frost’s lab and the storage---”

 

“I know where his office is,” you say.  “I had to find it to download the new security code for the elevator before.  It’s literally right down the hall.”

 

You’re technically right, but the biggest problem is that Strohmeier’s office is at the very _opposite_ side of the compound from the Hub, and because of the power outage, you’re going to have to navigate in complete darkness.  You’ve gotten through this maze once already--- not _well_ , obviously, you did get snatched by Ackers that one time, and you had to double back a lot to find all the supplies you needed to fix the elevator--- but you did eventually manage it, so you’re pretty confident you can get the both of you to the office safely.

 

Catherine is less confident.  “Are you sure about this?  With the lights out and the blast doors down we’ll have a higher chance of being cornered.”

 

“I know, Catherine,” you say, swiping your new Omnitool through the lock and stepping into the decontamination room.  “I’m the one who’s actually done this before, remember?  And besides, we’ve got the mega stun baton with us, so we’ll be ready for anything.  Just stay close, okay?”

 

Once the decontamination protocol is done, you step out into the blacked out hallway.  It’s a short walk to the crossroads between the Hub and the elevator, and after you get just left of the elevator, it’s a straight shot to Strohmeier’s office.  You don’t even need your headlight, though Catherine blinks her’s on and off at random, as if she can startle away any encroaching monsters.

 

As you creep along, you keep your senses peeled for any sign of Ackers.  The glitches you expect whenever a WAU monster is nearby haven’t happened yet, and there aren’t any noises to suggest that there’s a creepy flesh beast roaming the halls.  You’re not stupid enough to think the level is deserted and safe, but you can’t help feeling a little hopeful about getting through this unharmed.

 

For some reason the power outage never affected the lights or computers in Strohmeier’s office, so you end up going from complete darkness to a room bathed in light with one step.  It’s not great for escaping the notice of Proxies, but it is helpful when looking for a hiding place for a bunch of battery packs.  You stay near the door with your mega baton while Catherine rummages around in the desk and file cabinets.

 

“Hey, keep it down,” you mutter over your shoulder at her, when her attempts at opening the locked drawers make the whole thing rattle loudly.

 

“I’m trying, but it’s hard to break a lock quietly,” says Catherine.  “Good thing I’m in a power suit, otherwise I wouldn’t even have the strength necessary to break them at all.”

 

“Great, whatever, just keep it down,” you say.  “We really don’t want to be caught by one of these things.”

 

The rattling gets a little quieter, but not by much.  You force your mind to focus on the sounds outside of the room, listening for the guttural noises of an approaching Proxy while trying to keep yourself from letting your memories overpower you and inadvertently trigger a memory episode.  Much as you hate to admit it, having power-suit-Catherine around is doing wonders to help delineate between Before and Now, and makes it easier to stay focused.

 

“Found them,” says Catherine after forcing open the second to last drawer of the tallest filing cabinet.  “Looks like there’s four of them still in here.  I don’t know how good their condition is, but at least we have something.”

 

“Great, pack ‘em up and let’s go,” you say.

 

As Catherine begins stowing away the batteries in her suit’s storage belt, you start to feel a rumble in your brain.  It takes you a second to realize it’s not your memory trying to overthrow your attention but an actually-happening-right-now rumble, and by then the lights have started to double and your vision starts breaking down into pixels.

 

“Shit, Catherine, we need to go,” you say.

 

“I know, I know, just give me a sec,” says Catherine, fumbling with the last of the batteries, and then she’s by your side, battery in one hand and stun baton in the other.  “Go, go!”

 

Not even ten steps from the door you hear a roar way too close, and a door down the right hand hallway slides open.

 

You run.  It’s not worth it to hide, and all you need to do is get into the decontamination room before the Proxy can catch up and you’ll be home free.  The Proxy is quick but you and Catherine are faster, so all you have to do is keep ahead of it.

 

You’re not counting on the Proxy catching up to you at the elevator, or on there being a Proxy already _at_ the elevator.  And you’re definitely not counting on that Proxy being _Ackers_.

 

“Get to the door, just go!” you shout, shoving Catherine to the side.  You send her down the hall towards the Hub, putting yourself between her and the Proxies.  They’ve ganged up on you, and they’re close enough now that you keep seeing double, the world lurching in your eyes like a vertigo attack, and you want so badly to run.  Instead you raise your baton and take aim.

 

Your first shot strikes the hallway Proxy right in the chest, knocking it back against the far wall and lighting it up like firecracker, electricity snaking through it and drawing out a deafening screech from the beast.  The sound alone is enough to rattle your senses, and your vision goes in and out as you try to refocus your aim on Ackers.

 

A normal stun baton would take another five seconds to load, giving Ackers the needed time to rush you and overload your brain enough to render you unconscious.  But this is not a normal stun baton, and the reload time is practically instantaneous.  Less than a heartbeat after your first shot, you squeeze off another, hitting Ackers high on the shoulder, near his eyeless face.

 

At the end of the hall, Catherine has managed to open the doors to the decontamination room.  She screams, “Gremlin!  Come on!”

 

Immediately you bolt down the hallway, leaving the roaring Proxies back at the crossroad.  The door to the decontamination room is closing as you reach it, but you manage to leap through before they close completely, sealing you and Catherine inside.

 

You gasp, slumped against inner door, as you wait for your vision to smooth out.

 

Then you glare at Catherine.   _“Gremlin?”_

 

“It’s your name until you pick another one,” says Catherine between breaths.  “Besides, it got your attention, didn’t it?”

 

“No, but seriously, Gremlin?”  You struggle upright, resettling the mega baton in your grip.  “That’s not even the correct insult!  He was trying to say Golem but he messed it up.”

 

“It upsets you,” says Catherine, which wasn’t your fucking point, but whatever.  “Just like not having his left hand upsets Lefty.  They’re both names you don’t like, so it’s fair.”

 

The inner door of the decontamination room opens and you step into the safety of the Hub.  On the other side of the outer door, you can just pick out the moving shadows of twitching Proxies still sprawled out on the floor.  You doubt they’ll stay there for long, but it should give you just enough time to say what you need to say.

 

Catherine heads straight for the vent, but you stop her before she can climb up to it.  “Hold on a sec.  Before we go, I need to talk to you.”

 

“Really?  You want to talk now?”  Catherine waves her own baton around at the dilapidated room.  “Can’t this wait until we’re a safer distance away from WAU creatures?”

 

“Remember when we were here last time, and you asked me to get in the scanner to see what I was made of?” you say.

 

Catherine goes still, her red light eyes dropping away from yours.  It's a struggle to keep your voice level, but you try anyway.  “You said you wanted to know how I was made so you could get me on the ARK, but that was a lie.  You wanted to know how to make another body like mine.  You wanted to know how to repeat this process with the power suit, because you already knew what was going to happen.”

 

“You know there was no other alternative,” says Catherine, still not looking at you.  “What was I supposed to do?  We needed to launch the ARK, and you were the one who asked if there was any other way.”

 

“You lied, Catherine,” you say.  Your grip on her arm tightens enough that it hurts even you, but you don't let go.  “You lied, and you kept lying all the way to the Pilot Seat, because you knew that if you told me what was really going to happen, I wouldn’t have done it.”

 

“I told you how the scans work!” snaps Catherine  “I keep telling you and you just keep ignoring me!  You can’t blame me for that!”

 

Catherine jerks away with unexpected force, and your grip on her breaks easily.  She takes several steps away from you, but you close the distance to get right up in her face.

 

You tell her, “I can blame you for leaving me at Omicron,” because it’s true.  It hurts to say, but you’ve been thinking it for days, for _eons_ , and you find a strange release in letting the words out.  “I can blame you for leaving me there to think about everything I’ve done, everything _you’ve_ done, in the prison you made for me.  I can blame you for that, Catherine, and you know it.”

 

“If you hadn’t agreed to the transfer I would’ve gone into the power suit myself,” says Catherine, voice shaky and wet.

 

“But that’s not what happened.  Maybe you would’ve gone into the suit instead--- but I don’t think so.  I think you were too scared to be alone in a body down there, or maybe just too scared to be in a body at all.  Whose body are you even in, Catherine?  Who did you cannibalize to keep yourself going?”

 

“Stop it---”

 

“The worst part of this is, it doesn’t even matter.  They way we are, _the outcome you made sure came true_ , doesn’t change a goddamn thing.  No matter what, I still made stupid decisions because of what I thought we were, and you make fucking sure I paid the price for that trust.”

 

“Simon---”  


There’s a crash against the decontamination door, and you whip around to see Ackers slamming the unharmed side of its body on the glass. Your vision only skitters a little at its nearby presence, but you doubt the doors are going to hold the monsters back for long.

 

“Shit,” you say, and start backing towards the vent.

 

“We need to leave,” says Catherine.   _“Now!”_

 

You both scramble your way into the vent, and you make sure to shut the door behind you this time.  You can’t tell if the Proxies have broken through or are even capable of chasing you through the vents, but you’re not going to wait around to find out.

 

Catherine is ahead of you, dragging herself along the tight throughway, and it gives you time to think.  As you elbow-crawl after her, back to the hangar, you can't help saying, “You called me Simon.”

  
“It won't happen again,” promises Catherine.  You believe her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	19. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gremlin, Lefty, and Catherine finally make Brandon into a real boy.

Catherine leaves the vent with more alacrity than she did at the Hub, and is almost to the hangar floor by the time you’ve exited and shut the vent door.  You descend more sedately, and pretend like you’re not burning to ask about her calling you by your real name.

 

_ “Hey, did you get the battery?”  _ asks Brandon, his voice echoing in the open hangar.

 

“Yes, four of them,” says Catherine.  She produces one from her belt pouch, and holds it up as if Brandon can see it.  “Not sure yet how viable they are, but we can test that in the control room.”

 

_ “And my Cortex chip?”  _ prompts Brandon.   _ “Figured out where that is yet?” _

 

“Uh, we’ll do that now,” you say.

 

Back in the control room, Catherine directs her Omnitool’s Helper Jane to prepare for a battery test and to upload the Dunbat schematics to one of the screens.  “Gremlin, you look for the Cortex chip and I’ll inspect the batteries,” she says.

 

“. . . Fine,” you say, instead of the million other things you want to shout at her right then.  This isn’t the place for the kind of fight you’re gunning to have.

 

You look through the maps laid out on the far screen, trying to figure out what all the little lines and boxes are supposed to mean.  It might as well be in Greek for all the understanding you glean from it, and you struggle through several readings of the maps before finally giving up.

 

“What exactly am I looking for?  What does the Cortex chip of a submarine look like and where would it even be stored?” you ask Catherine.

 

“It should be stored in the back, probably accessible from the interior,” says Catherine.  “It looks exactly like yours and my Cortex chips, so it’s small.”

 

“Okay,” you say, and when you look specifically at the parts of the map detailing the rear compartments of the DUNBAT, you manage to find one tiny place marked out as CC HOLDER which is a better option than anything you’ve come across so far.

 

“Hey Brandon,” you say aloud, looking through the observation window at the DUNBAT, “tell Lefty to look at the back of the hull for a half-meter by half-meter metal panel.”

 

_ “Alright,” _ says Brandon.  A pause.  “ _ He says he found it.  Now what?” _

 

“Tell him to pry it off, and then list what’s behind it.”

 

_ “Uh, okay.  That feels fucking weird,” _ says Brandon, and there’s an ominous groan of metal as the DUNBAT shifts in its holdings.   _ “Oh, right.  He says it looks like a slot reader, and it’s full of chips.  Wait, are you saying my Cortex chip is in there?” _

 

“Seems like it,” you say.  “Are any of the chips labeled ‘CC’?”

 

_ “He says yes,”  _ says Brandon.  _  “Don’t take it out, don’t---!” _

 

The DUNBAT goes quiet, the outer lights powering down and the mechanical arms lowering to hang lifelessly from the bulk of the submarine.  There’s static over the intercom, and the center screen that had been black before suddenly frizzles into color, showcasing the inner hull of the DUNBAT.

 

In one corner you can see Lefty, standing beside an open panel, a Cortex chip in his only hand.

 

“Goddammit, Lefty,” you say.  “How are we supposed to get you out now?”

 

“Well, with Brandon incapable of blocking our systems, we can do it from here,” says Catherine.

 

She does something to the computer, and then Helper Jane is politely informing you that the door to the DUNBAT is about to open, and to please keep clear of the hatch so as to avoid injuries.  On the computer screen, you watch as Lefty notices and then darts through the open door.  You hear him clamor down the stairs in the hangar, and then he comes into view on the other side of the fenced-in opening, waving the Cortex chip above his head.

 

“Got it!” shouts Lefty.

 

“Great, now we’ve got everything we need,” says Catherine.  She unhooks one of the batteries from the console and holds it up.  You have the weird impression that she’s smiling, but her face is just glass and metal and red light; there’s no way to tell.  “This battery is fully charged, it’ll be perfect for this.  All we need to do now is assemble the parts.”

 

Catherine heads back to the hangar.  You hesitate a moment longer, looking between the silent DUNBAT and the control room console, and think about Omicron.  Having the promise of a new body taken from you before you can even conceptualize it is one of the hardest realities you’ve had to deal with since you got here.  But Brandon isn’t going to wake up alone in a locked room like you did--- this will be different.  This time will be better.

 

You join Catherine and Lefty on the hangar floor where the supplies have all been laid out.  The body you recovered from Omicron has been laid out on it’s front, and Catherine is trying to disengage the pressure seal so as to get to the battery port.  It takes a few tries, what with the slimy nature of the ocean-imbued surface, but eventually it releases and she’s able to peel away the back layer of the suit.

 

Inside is a nasty slurry of congealed blood and pulpy flesh, and Catherine flinches away from it.  What surprises you is that Lefty is the one to pick up the slack--- he reaches right in and removes the old battery from under the gunk, cleans the access port, and inserts the new battery without missing a beat.  He has trouble resealing the suit with just one hand, but Catherine helps him with that, and between the two of them they get the whole thing sealed back up.

 

“When did you get an iron stomach?” you ask, because  _ you  _ sure as fuck felt queasy just looking at that.  “Do corpses not bother you anymore?”

 

“If you think that’s bad, wait till we get to the next part,” says Lefty, standing up.  “This person still has their head, after all.”

 

“What?” you say.

 

“We can’t insert the robot parts when there’s a skull in the way,” says Lefty.

 

You think about your Compound Examiner scan, and the exploded heads at Omicron.  You feel cold.  “Oh shit.”

 

“Yeah,” says Lefty.  “Go find a blunt instrument or an axe or something.”

 

“Will a knife do?” you ask, unclipping the knife you used to puncture the gel bulbs and holding it up.  “It’s not big, but it’s sharp.”

 

“If you want to saw a neck off with that thing, go ahead,” says Left dubiously.  “But I’d look for something bigger.”

 

“Right,” you say, stowing away the knife and walking out of the hangar.

 

At the top of the hallway leading to the common room you have to stop, because you’ve been hit by a gut punch of realization--- you were always going to have to break the head off that body.  If the Cortex chip had been left in the DUNBAT, Brandon would’ve had to watch all of you pulverize what was going to be his head like a butchered pig, or at least the head of a former colleague, and there’s no way to un-see that.  Maybe he’d understand, maybe he wouldn’t, but he would still hold that against you.  With the chip out, he won’t even know it happened.

 

You wonder if Lefty knew that when he pulled the chip, or if it was just a lucky coincidence.  You kind of want it to be the latter, but in your heart of hearts you know it was on fucking purpose.

 

“Goddammit, Lefty,” you mutter as you continue forward on your hunt for the jagged metal beams you saw sticking out of the structure gel clogging the stairs.  “It’s easier to hate you when you don’t do shit like that.”

 

Cutting out the beam from the gel is a goddamn Herculean task, and you end up having to slice away a lot of gel around it with your smaller knife just to yank it free.  One end is clotted with semi-hardened gel, and a flood of gel leaks all over the floor like a tar pit, but fuck it, you’ve got a heavy beam of metal with a sharpened edge and that’s good enough for you.

 

On your way back to the hangar you hear a muffled argument between Lefty and Catherine that gets louder and louder as you reach the main entrance.  You do your best to step quietly, straining to pick out what they’re saying.

 

“---told you, that’s not your decision!”

 

“I don’t understand why you don’t---”

 

“Because you won’t listen!  You never listen, no matter how many times I tell you!  You just do whatever you want, as if there aren’t any consequences!”

 

“What did you want me to do, huh?  Just wait around until---”

 

“Shh, wait--- Gremlin?  Is that you?”

 

Shit.  You stop trying to creep your way around the entrance room, and instead stroll right into the hangar like you weren't just trying to eavesdrop on their private conversation.  “Yeah, I’m here.  Got a blunt instrument, as promised.  I just hope it’s big enough.”

 

“It should work,” says Lefty.  He moves as if to take it from you, and then jerks back after noticing his lack of hand.  He clears his throat.  “Who wants to do the honors?”   
  


You share a look with Catherine, who has gone unnaturally still.  You say, “I’ll do it.”

 

Catherine and Lefty step back as you approach the body.  The helmet has been removed, but the body is still laying face down, so you can’t see any of their features.  You sort of know who they used to be--- you datamined her, learned that she used to be called “Jonesy” and was a dispatcher for Upsilon and that she suffocated in her suit like most of the Theta evacuation party--- but that’s not going to matter after this.  Right now, what matters is getting a body ready so that Brandon can live.

 

You raise the sharp metal beam and line up your shot.  It’s like whack-a-mole, right?  Just an arcade game, but with a lethal weapon and a dead person.  You resettle your grip on the beam and then bring it down on the back of her neck.

 

The crunch and splatter reminds you of the time you dropped pumpkins from your apartment window with Jesse and Sean on Halloween.  There’s resistance, a heavy block between the metal and the rest of the meat, but there’s still this spray of gooey innards, dark red and grey like moldy tapioca.  The neck isn’t severed, though.  You raise the beam and slam it back down, over and over, until the rubbery skin linking her body together finally tears completely, leaving a clean divide between the tattered remains of her lower jaw and the meaty leaking mess of the rest of her body.

 

“That’s good enough,” says Lefty, and his voice is identical to yours, a perfect match, to the point that you aren’t immediately certain it wasn’t you who spoke.  As if you were the one to tell yourself to stop.  But then Lefty steps into your line of sight and drags the severed head away from the main body.  He hurls it over the open hole of the hangar, down into the half-submerged tunnel leading out of Theta.  “On to the next step.”

 

“Right,” you say, deliberately turning around before setting aside the metal beam.  Your hands are shaking.  Why are your hands shaking?  “Right.  The next step.”

 

“Catherine, get the robo-face parts but leave the Cortex chip out for now,” says Lefty.  “Gremlin, help me get this thing upright.”

 

You want to balk at the name, but you also want to throw up.  You’re not sure how your brain is trying to compensate for your upchuck reflex, but you figure speaking would be a bad idea right now.  So you just nod, and grab one side of the decapitated body and haul it up to lean against the wall.

 

Catherine hands you the robo-face and says, “What about the gel?  That bin is heavy, it’s going to be a challenge to pour in the gel slow enough.”

 

“There’s three of us, I think we can manage,” says Lefty, while you shove the robo-face into the core of the spine, making sure to orient the eyes and speaker to face the front.

 

And you do manage, although not prettily.  You and Lefty heft the bin up and Catherine helps aim and keep track of how quickly the gel is absorbed into the body.  Luckily Lefty doesn’t need both hands to hold up a container, and the body is much more receptive to the gel than the body you made at Omicron was.  You use almost three quarters of the gel in the trash bin before the body stops absorbing it, and then you pour a little extra on to secure the robo-face to the body.

 

“Okay,” says Lefty, once the bin has been set aside.  He presses a button on the side of the life support system strapped to the suit back, and then says, “Suit is on, battery should be lighting up the gel as we speak.  Now: Cortex chip and helmet, in the order, and make it fast.”

  
Catherine has the Cortex chip so you grab the helmet.  You look at her and nod.  She nods back and then slaps the Cortex chip in, and you cover the whole thing with the helmet and seal it closed.  Then you all step back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	20. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brandon has a request.

You don’t know how long you’re supposed to wait, but even just the few heartbeats between closing the seal and the flicker of red light eyes is a goddamn eternity to you.

 

“---Don’t pull it out yet! I’m--- wait, what?”  says Brandon, loudly at first and then tapering down to a whisper.  His head moves, his eyes twitching as he surveys the floor, the room, you.  He breathes hard, gasping, “I’m human?”

 

“Close enough,” says Lefty.

 

“Hey, Brandon,” you say, waving stupidly.  “Welcome to the human-shaped club.”

 

Brandon looks down at himself, and you watch with a weird almost-physical empathy as he discovers the reality of his new body.  “Whoa.”

 

“It can be strange,” says Catherine suddenly, seemingly choosing each word with care, “to go from a non-human shape to a human one without any warning.  Take your time.  If you want some privacy, we can go into the next room.”

 

“You don’t have to,” says Brandon uncertainly.  You’re about to politely push the issue, but then Brandon asks, “Is there a mirror anywhere?  I want to see--- I want to know what I look like.”

 

“You look almost exactly like me,” you tell him helpfully.  “Except wet.”

 

“And less of an asshole,” says Lefty.

 

You glare.  “Better than looking like love child of Buzz Aldrin and the Michelin Man.”

 

“Yeah, if by better you mean worse because you’re the deep sea version of Gollum,” says Lefty.

 

“Guys, please,” says Catherine tiredly.

 

“I only understood about half of what you two just said,” admits Brandon, his head turning to look between you and Lefty like he’s watching a tennis match.  “And I still want a mirror.”

 

“There’s one in Catherine’s lab,” says Lefty.

 

“I used it before, to get a look at myself,” you say, stepping forward to offer your hand to Brandon.  Brandon accepts it, and you haul him to his feet.  “It’ll only show your upper body, but that’s the important part anyway.”

 

“ _We_ used the mirror,” corrects Lefty unnecessarily.  “We’re the same fucking person, remember?”

 

“Shut up,” you say.  You let go of Brandon so you can ball your fists up at your sides.  “Can you just shut the fuck up.”

 

“I’m not saying anything you don’t already know,” says Lefty.

 

“Stop it,” says Catherine.  She moves to stand between you and Lefty.  She gestures towards the door, saying, “You two go to the lab.  We’ll stay here.”

 

“That’s the smartest thing you’ve said all day,” you say, and hold out your arm for Brandon to balance with.  “C’mon, it’s this way.”

 

Brandon doesn’t move right away, but when he takes his first faltering step you can guess why.  Moving around by submarine engines and rudders is a whole universe of difference compared to manually putting each foot in front of the other over and over.  At first he ignores your proffered help, but after he takes more than five seconds to move a leg and still somehow almost falls over, he grabs your bicep like a vice.  He moves a little easier after that.

 

“You know, I actually lived here for a while,” says Brandon once you’re out of the hangar.  “Not full time, at least not until the evac orders, but I was here enough to remember the layout.  And the last place I went to here was Catherine’s lab for my scan.”

 

“Oh, yeah,” you say.  “Huh.  I’ve even been in your room, like, multiple times.  By the way, what was up with that hiding spot for the mega baton?”

 

“Modding a stun baton isn’t exactly corporate policy,” jokes Brandon.  “Only me, Goya, and Krier knew about it.  Didn't get a lot of chance to use it while I was here, but it's nice to have around, I guess.  Was there any juice left in it?"

 

At this point you’ve reached the stairs, and while there aren’t a lot of them, it takes both of your concentration to keep Brandon from falling flat on his face.  You get him up safely, though, and start up the smooth incline towards the lab.

 

“It did, actually.  There were two of the Proxies down there--- more than I'd have liked but what can y'do?--- and I took them down with one shot apiece.  That reload time is incredible!  Your modded baton is easily the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever seen here, and where I’m from we didn’t have robots, so that’s really saying something.”

 

Brandon laughs.  “Thanks, glad it helped.”

 

“Definitely,” you say.  “You might not be getting it back, I love it too much.”

 

“Lucky for me I know how to make another,” says Brandon around another laugh.  “We’ve got enough supplies around here I could make one for each of us and still have pieces left over.”

 

“I’m kind of surprised it was still there,” you admit.  “I figured you would’ve--- uh.”

 

Brandon looks over at you.  You trip over the mental roadblock of Brandon’s death and if it would be a huge dick move to tell him about it.  On the one hand, you are really curious about why Brandon went to all the trouble of sabotaging the elevator but didn’t bother retrieving his baton; on the other hand, you really, really don’t want to have a conversation about how everyone at Theta died.

 

You take the easy route and blurt, “Nevermind, that’s not important.  I’m just glad we have it now and can keep ourselves safe.  Trust me, this place is crawling with nasties, and it’s better to have  a weapon than nothing at all.  But as long as we stay up here everything should be--- oh, here we are!”

 

You’ve arrived at the round foyer that separates the brain scan room from the AR room, and turn right to enter the latter.  You lead Brandon to the mirror on the right hand wall, and then step aside.

 

Brandon stares at his reflection.  He doesn’t move, doesn’t raise his hands or balk or fall over; he just stares.  It’s relatively quiet here, with just the usual grumble of a metal structure settling under pressure and the occasional clank of machinery trying to keep up the internal systems.  Inside the space between you and Brandon, there's just the static pulse of your breathing.

 

The whole thing feels weirdly intimate, so you slip quietly out of the room and head to the other lab.  It’s poorly lit, casting most of the room in shadow, but you take the opportunity to look a little closer at the things you ignored your second time through.

 

At the center of the room is a modified Pilot Seat, specifically meant for taking brain scans.  It looks somewhat like the version Dr. Munshi used back in 2015, but the similarity is completely superficial; this model is sleeker, much more compact and economical, and has the added benefit of a ceiling-suspended robot to help with modifications and repairs.  Around the room there are all kinds of computers and machines to help with the brain scan process, including the mod center you used to create the artificial reality environment you needed to trick ARK-Brandon into telling you the cypher for the security system.  Brandon had been working for Strohmeier as a member of base security, and there was no one else on the single undamaged storage chip who’d know how to release the quarantine protocols on the DUNBAT.  In hindsight, it’s kind of funny to realize that Brandon had a hand in his own escape--- without ARK-Brandon, DUNBAT-Brandon would’ve stayed locked up in the hangar.

 

“Hey, Gremlin?” calls Brandon from the other room.

 

“Yeah?” you say as you head for the AR room.  From the doorway you can see that Brandon has moved, and is now standing by the simulation console.  He turns to look as you enter, and holds something up for you to see.

 

“What’s this chip for?”

 

You freeze.  It’s the undamaged brain scan storage chip, the one you couldn’t bring yourself to erase after use, even though Catherine had given you the all-clear to do so.  The same storage chip that has Brandon’s scan on it.  The same storage chip that has _Alice’s_ scan on it.

 

“Um.”  Brandon is still looking at you, and you blurt, “It’s a storage chip.  For brain scans.  They’re back ups of the ones that got put on the ARK.”

 

“They’re brain scans?” says Brandon.  He looks at the chip.  “Who’s on it?”

 

“Lindwall, Sarang, Bass, Wolchezk, Komorebi, Strasky,” you list, anxiety building up a lump in your throat.  “Koster.  You.”

 

“I’m on here?” says Brandon faintly.  Then, louder, “Wait, _Alice_ is on here?  Oh my--- Holy shit.   _Holy shit,_ this is--- Is there any way to get her out of this chip and into a Cortex chip?”

 

“What?” you ask.

 

“Her brain, is there any way to get it into a body, like mine, like ours?” asks Brandon with a sudden fervor, holding the chip like it’s a faberge egg.  “Can we bring her back?”

 

“I have no idea,” you admit.  “You’d have to ask Catherine.”

  
From behind you comes the question, “Ask me what?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	21. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lefty buys a clue.

“No,” you say.

 

“Oh come on,” says Gremlin in exasperation.

 

“ _No,_ ” you insist, barely refraining from literally putting your foot down.  “We’re not making any more bodies, this isn’t a goddamn Build-A-Bear.  We can’t keep doing this.”

 

“Why the hell not?” asks Brandon.  “You made my body, why is one more any harder?”

 

“Lefty’s right,” says Catherine, and you feel a swell of vindication at that.  “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”

 

“I know exactly what I’m asking for,” says Brandon.  “I’m asking for you to save Alice.  It’s not that fucking complicated.”

 

“It _is_ very complicated,” insists Catherine.  “You don’t understand the consequences of doing this.  You think you’re just going to bring her back like nothing’s changed, but you’re wrong.  Her scan is from a time when PATHOS-II was still functional and she had a normal body--- your plan is to dump her into this rundown place without any warning or permission.  She isn’t making this choice, _you_ are.”

 

There’s an edge to Catherine’s voice, and you get the feeling she’s not talking about just Alice anymore.

 

“None of us are in a position to make that kind of decision for her.  She might not want to be here, once she realizes what’s left.  This isn’t about you reuniting with a friend, this is about pulling someone out of a safe place and into a hellscape,” says Catherine.  “There’s no way to know if she can even handle it, and what if she can’t?  What if she goes insane?”

 

“I adjusted pretty damn well to being a time-traveling robot person,” says Gremlin bluntly.  “Who’s to say she can’t?”

 

“The circumstances are completely different,” says Catherine.  “Your situation isn’t comparable to Alice’s.”

 

“And for the record, we didn’t do _that_ well at adjusting,” you tell him, thinking about the launch dome at Phi, of your fights with Catherine.  Gremlin glares at you and you glare back.  “Why are you even arguing for this?  We don’t know Alice, there’s no reason to bring her back.”

 

“What, so we’re just supposed to leave her there?” says Gremlin.  “Just rotting away in a computer chip?  That’s its own death sentence, and by your guys’ logic we aren’t in a position to make that decision for her.”

 

“Not everyone who comes back is insane,” points out Brandon.  “I--- wasn’t great, initially, but I figured it out and adjusted well enough to get this far. _You_ adjusted to being, what, and Omnitool _and_ a person?  If you can do it, Alice sure as hell can.”

 

“None of you are listening to me!” says Catherine, raising her closed fists up to her head, as if trying to block out a noise.  “Think about this from Alice's perspective!  What if she doesn’t want to be here so much that she kills herself?”

 

That question seems to throw Brandon.  He jerks back, cradling the chip closer to his chest.

 

“She wouldn’t,” he says.

 

“But what if she does?” counters Catherine.  “What if she can’t stand to be here?  Can you accept that?  If you won’t let her decide to come back, you need to let her decide to leave.”

 

You look at Catherine.  You look at her, and the world breaks around you.  Your memories shutter over your eyes, and then you’re at the comm. center at Upsilon, hearing the crunch of torn metal above you, feeling the rush of pressure and water crash on top of your head.  You’re watching your normal human arms suddenly turn alien and wrong between one blink and the next.  The world breaks, and you are not you anymore.

 

You look at Catherine, and realize you’re a fucking idiot.

 

“Why don’t we just ask her with the simulator?” you say into the sudden quiet.  Six red dots focus in on you, three bodies emanating surprise.  “Remember how we got the security cyphers?  Why not just do that, but with Alice.”

 

“I can’t do it the same way, I’m not plugged into the computers,” says Catherine.  “We need to set up a script and mic system, but I doubt she’s going to want to talk to me.”

 

“Then Brandon can talk to her,” says Gremlin.  “We can set it up just like before, but instead he’ll be the one to explain the situation to her.”

 

“But slowly,” you add, “so that she doesn’t overload.”

 

“Whoa, hang on a second,” interrupts Brandon.  “What are you guys talking about?  How are we going to ask her anything without giving her a body first?  Are you going to put her in a robot?”

 

“No,” says Gremlin.  “There’s an artificial reality simulator in there, and if we plug in that chip and an environment chip, we can convince her that she’s in the scan room talking to you over an intercom.  She won’t remember it later, but we can at least get a sense of how she’d feel about not being technically human.”

 

“And you’ve done this before?” says Brandon.

 

“Yeah, when we needed you to tell us the security cyphers we needed to release the quarantine on the DUNBAT,” you say, realizing only after you’ve spoken that maybe you should’ve used a little more finesse with that particular bomb drop.

 

Brandon looks between you and Gremlin, and Gremlin shrinks away guiltily.  “What?  You did this to _me?”_

 

“And it worked,” you say pointedly, drawing Brandon’s attention.  You glance at Catherine.  “If it worked once, it could work again.”

  
Catherine has lowered her hands and is staring at the ground.  It takes her another moment to respond, but then, “Okay.  Let’s give it a try.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	22. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lefty has an important question to ask.

Getting everything set up is about as difficult as before, but for different reasons: instead of hunting down the appropriate chips, downloading the needed content, and ransacking Brandon’s room for interrogation clues, you all are scrounging around to find the correct transcription hardware and updating the Tool chip of Catherine’s Omnitool enough to let her access the artificial reality simulator.  Gremlin sticks with Brandon, the pair of them doing the bulk of the leg work, while you stay behind with Catherine in the AR room.

 

Being alone with her again is about as stressful as always, but now there’s a new flavor to it: regret.  It’s an incredibly unpleasant feeling--- no wonder you worked so hard to avoid it--- but you need to say this, before you get run over by her bulldozer words.  You just need to fucking  _ say it. _  “Catherine, what you said back there, about Alice---”

 

“Let’s not do this again,” says Catherine without looking up from the computer screen.

 

“Catherine,” you say, and then can’t figure out how to keep going.  “I just--- I know I haven’t--- I guess I--- Look, I’m sorry.”

 

Catherine doesn’t respond, and somehow that makes it easier to continue.  “You were right, before.  When I was down at Phi, trying to bring you back, I wasn’t thinking about what it would mean for you.  I wasn’t thinking about you at all, really, I was thinking about myself and how I--- I just didn’t want to be alone.”  You take a breath, but your words still come out shaky.  “It was never about you, it was about me.  And I’m sorry.”

 

This time Catherine stops what she’s doing to look at you.  “What are you sorry for, Simon?  For putting me in a body I don’t want or for not letting me make that choice?”

 

“Both,” you say, wincing.  “I know this doesn't really fix anything, and you don’t need to believe me or stop being mad at me.  I just need to say it.”

 

“Thank you for the apology,” says Catherine.  She looks at you for another moment, and then turns back to the computer.  It’s a terse moment before she says, “But you’re right, this doesn’t fix anything.”

 

“Yeah,” you say quietly.  “I know.”

 

Catherine returns to her work, her attention pulled elsewhere, but your mind is still caught on the implications of reviving a dead friend.  That’s basically what Brandon wants to do--- revive Alice.  And while Brandon himself has shown incredible resilience to being a copy of himself no matter the body, there’s no guarantee that Alice will be the same.  You don’t know Alice except through the few bits of data you gleaned throughout your trip, and honestly, you probably know more about Ackers than her.  This entire enterprise could blow right up in Brandon’s face, and then what?  Will Brandon be able to handle  _ that? _

 

When you were alone in the hangar and you tried to call out Catherine on her volunteering her body for Brandon, you were still blinded by your own fears surrounding Catherine’s blow-up at Tau.  You’ve been seeing it as an insult: that she’d rather be dead than be with you.  But listening to her fight with Brandon, you doubt it has anything to do with you at all.  This is about  _ choice _ , not company.  You’re not sure that Brandon will be able to accept the difference.

 

Then again, Brandon managed to function as a submarine for a week and still has his wits about him--- maybe he’s smart enough to have already figured all this stuff out, and is still okay with making that leap.

 

You don’t get a chance to ask Catherine about any of this, because not a second after you have the urge to ask, Gremlin and Brandon are returning with the updated Tool chip.

 

“Alright, are we ready to go?” asks Gremlin.

 

“Almost,” says Catherine.  She replaces the Tool chips, and then does something with Helper Jane and the computer.  On the screen, you watch her load up Alice’s brain scan and the scan room environment onto the simulator.  Then she steps back and gestures for Brandon.  “Okay, we’re ready.  Just speak into the mic, and the program will translate it as you talking to her through the lab speakers.”

 

Brandon sits down at the desk.  On the screen, you watch the loading page turn into an image of the brain scan lab, the Pilot Seat occupied by a slim, dark haired woman in pale blue PATHOS-II fatigues.  She blinks and looks around the room.

 

“Brandon?” she says, and you have a minor heart attack thinking  _ she knows? _ but then you remember the note she gave to Brandon, the one asking him to accompany her to her scan, and you let out a relieved breath.

 

Brandon leans forward and says, “I’m here, don’t worry, I just had to step out for a sec.  Strohmeier, you know?”

 

“Is everything alright?” she asks.  “Where’s Dr. Chun?”

 

“Reed just got back,” says Brandon, and that must mean something, because both Alice and Catherine react to it.  Catherine tucks her shoulders up near her ears, and Alice shakes her head knowingly.

 

“Of course,” says Alice.  “Can’t compete with that.”

 

“Hey, Al, can I ask you something?” says Brandon with an undertone of anxiety, and already you’re regretting this suggestion.  “What if you--- what if another copy of us, of our brains, is made, a copy that doesn’t go on the ARK.  And that copy could instead be put in a new body that could live forever, here on Earth.  What do you think of that?”

 

“We’re all going on the ARK, Brand,” says Alice.  “Why would we need an extra copy, or even an extra body?”

 

“I know, but if the option were there, would you take it?” presses Brandon.

 

“Is this anything like that Continuity thing Robin’s been talking about?” asks Alice.  The status bar at the top right corner of the screen shows an uptick in her stress level.  You glance over and inadvertently lock eyes with Gremlin, whose arms are crossed tightly over his chest.  Catherine’s eyes are glued to the screen, tensed up like she’s waiting to pounce.  Brandon is equally focused, but probably for different reasons. 

 

“This has nothing to do with that,” says Brandon firmly.  “I swear, Al, this is a separate issue.  Do you--- Do you remember that movie we saw, the one we stole from Alvaro?  About the rangers?”

 

“Yes, I remember.”

 

Brandon’s voice gets softer, more intimate and questioning, and you have the sudden urge to give them some privacy.  “You know how, at the end of it, you said that as long as we were together, you wouldn’t mind being the last people on Earth?”

 

“Brand, why are you asking me this?” asks Alice.  Her stress levels are arching higher, and you know that if this keeps up she’s going to crash.

 

“I need to know if you meant it,” says Brandon.  “Did you mean what you said?  Every word of it?”

 

“What kind of question---?  Bran, why are you asking me---?”

 

“Because I need to know, Alice,” says Brandon loudly, talking over her.  He’s got both fists clenched on the desk, is leaned forward like he’s praying.  “I just need to know.  Tell me, did you mean that?”

 

Alice screams, “Yes I mean it, of course I fucking meant it, why are you asking me this, what’s wrong, Brandon, what’s---!” and Catherine lunges forward to slap a console button, shutting off the simulation before Alice can work herself up into a full breakdown.  Brandon jerks up, whirling around to shove at Catherine.

 

“What the fuck did you do?” snarls Brandon.  “Is she alright?  What the hell is wrong with you?”

 

“Her stress levels were getting too high,” says Catherine.  “The system isn’t complex enough to handle such high emotions, and the scans themselves aren’t fully immersed enough to help assuage the dissonance between perception and expectation.”

 

Brandon stands up, and Catherine scuttles backward.  “Speak fucking English!  What did you do?”

 

“Alice was flipping out and about to break the game,” explains Gremlin calmly.  “Catherine didn’t want you to see the Error Code pop up, so she shut it down manually.  She was trying to avoid a full meltdown, from both you and Alice.”

 

“Her scan is fine,” you add.  “She’s not going to remember this conversation.  You could keep up loading her scan to the simulation indefinitely, and she’d never remember any of it.”

 

Brandon breathes heavily but off-beat, like he’s caught between a panic attack and having finished a marathon.  Gremlin moves to stand just shy of him, not touching, but clearly within Brandon’s reach.  Brandon ducks his head, moves his hands in aborted gestures, and then goes still.  When he finally looks up, he speaks steadily.

 

“Are you satisfied with her answer?” asks Brandon, and it’s clear he’s not talking to you or Gremlin; he’s only got eyes for Catherine.  “Can we put her in a body now?”

 

The pause that follows is long, but not long enough once you hear the answer.

 

“On one condition,” says Catherine.  “That body has to be mine.”

 

“No, you can’t---” you start, but Catherine rounds on you, cutting you off.

 

“You said you were sorry,” she says, and her voice is cold steel, a longsword through the heart.  “You said that you were sorry for putting me through this, for making me stay in this body.  I told you that I didn’t like this, that I preferred the Omnitool.  An apology can’t fix that.”

 

You shake your head, one hand outstretched.  “Come on, Catherine, please don’t do this.”

 

Catherine is undaunted.  “You said you were sorry, but now you need to fix it.  Ask me if I want to be in a body.  Ask me, Simon.”

 

“Catherine---”

 

“ _ Ask. Me. _ ”

 

You stare at her.  You can’t fathom the distance between yourself and her, you can’t even extend the final few centimeters to touch her.  There’s no way you can ask her, none, because you cannot accept her answer.  You take in a shaky breath.

  
_ “Do you want to be in your body?” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	23. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One more name is added to the list of Apocalypse Survivors.

_ “Do you want to be in your body?” _

 

That’s your voice, but they’re not your words.  Gremlin still has his arms crossed, still has that constant air of aggression clinging to him, but his tone is perfectly neutral.  Catherine looks back at him, then to you.

 

“Do you--- do you want to stay in your body?” you ask, shakier, but by god you can’t let Gremlin be the one she answers.

 

“No,” says Catherine.  She looks between the two of you, and says, “I don’t want to be in this body anymore.”

 

“Where do you want to be?” asks Gremlin.  “The Omnitool?”

 

“Yes,” says Catherine.

 

“Which one?” you ask.

 

“Mine,” says Catherine, pointing to the Omnitool still logged in to the simulator.  “The Cortex chip slot is empty and the Tool chip is fully updated now.”

 

“Okay,” says Gremlin, like it’s simple.  Like anything could be that simple.

 

Catherine detaches the Omnitool from the console.  Then she goes to the other desk and picks up the empty Cortex chip she took from the robot parts you used to make Brandon.  She hands both of these objects to you.

 

“It will be easier for Alice and all of you if she wakes up in the Pilot Seat,” says Catherine, while you try to keep the Omnitool and chip contained in your single hand.  “So I’ll sit down in it, and then you will remove my chip.  Plug me into the Omnitool, and then into the console, and I can get Alice transferred onto the blank chip.  Then put that chip in this body, and Alice will wake up.”

 

“Are you sure?” you blurt, unable to contain yourself.

 

“Yes,” says Catherine, rock steady.  “I’m sure.  I’m trusting you to get me back in the Omnitool safely.  I can trust you, right?”

 

“Right,” you say immediately, nodding.  Of course she can trust you.  You’ve done far more for worse reasons; you can manage this much for her.

 

Catherine nods.  “Good.”

 

With that, Catherine goes straight to the other room and sits down on the Pilot Seat.  The rest of you follow at a more uncertain pace, with Brandon at the very tail and Gremlin a few steps ahead.

 

“Alright, I’ll handle the helmet part, since that’s going to require more--- dexterity,” finishes Gremlin lamely, and you think he might’ve actually avoided outright dragging you about your lack of hand, which is.  Nice of him.  Unusual, but nice.

 

“And I’ll get the chip,” you say.  You holster the Omnitool and pocket the blank chip.  Then you stand on one side of Catherine’s chair while Gremlin stands on the other, with Brandon hovering somewhere in the vicinity.  You share a look with Gremlin, and nod.

 

Gremlin nods back.  He reaches up, but hesitates just shy of touching Catherine's helmet.  “You ready?”

 

“Yes,” she says

 

“Okay,” says Gremlin.  He unclips the helmet seal, and then carefully twists it free from the taffy-like grip of the excess gel.  Inside is the muddy gel mountain gathered at the top of her neck, from which the robo-face is attached.  The flat, metallic T-shaped face stays mostly still, but the eyes twitch in tune with her hands, like she’s trying (and failing) not to broadcast her nervousness.  You reach for the back slot of her robo-face and very, very gently slide the Cortex chip free.

 

The second the chip is out of the slot, Catherine’s body loosens.  She doesn’t drop into a full slump; her shoulders fall, her hands stop moving, and her eyes dim, but her back stays mostly straight and her head remains up, like she’s simply resting her eyes.

 

You take her Cortex chip and Omnitool and set them on the nearby desk.  You hold the Omnitool down with your stump while you use your hand to slide the Cortex chip into the correct slot.  The screen flashes CORTEX CHIP ACCEPTED but you’re not going to hear her voice until you dock the Omnitool.

 

So that’s what you do: you go the AR room and plug her back in and watch the screens light up with her human face.

 

“Thank you,” she says immediately, and the gratitude in her voice is so blatant that you feel especially stupid for not noticing her unhappiness before.  “Honestly, thank you.  I want you to know I appreciate this, and I’m really happy I get to be back in this form.  It’s so much more comfortable for me, so thank you.”

 

“You’re welcome,” you say, and shit, your voice is wobbly like you’re crying.  But robots can’t cry, right?  It’s just a trick of your senses or something.  You clear your throat.  “Everything feel okay in there?”

 

“Yes, I’m good on this end,” says Catherine.

 

“Great,” says Gremlin, “are we ready to transfer Alice now?”

 

“Load up the chip and I’ll transfer the data,” chimes Catherine.

 

You take the blank chip out of your pouch pocket and slide it into one of the adapters.  Several different pages flash over the screen--- chip accepted, brain scan selected, brain scan uploading, uploading complete--- before Catherine says, “Alice is ready to go.”

 

“Brandon?” you say once you’ve removed the chip.  You hold out Alice’s Cortex chip to him, and after a brief hesitation Brandon accepts it.

 

“Let’s do this,” says Brandon.

 

You all go back to the brain scan room--- well, you almost don’t, but then Catherine says quietly through a single speaker by the desk, “Go say hello,” and you feel obligated to join them.  Gremlin takes up helmet duty again, and Brandon takes your previous spot on the other side of the chair.  You stand just off to the side, enough to be seen when she wakes up by far back enough to not steal attention.  This, like so many things, is not about you.

 

Brandon slides the Cortex chip into the robo-face, Gremlin secures the helmet, and then they both stand back, hovering over the body like nervous parents, Brandon more so than Gremlin.  There’s that pause, that hiccup between death and life, and then the red eyes light up.

 

“Dr. Chun?” comes Alice’s voice, confused and small despite her over-large power suit body.  She shifts in her seat, looks around the room.  Her eyes snap immediately to Brandon when he steps closer to her.

 

“Hey Alice, it’s me.  Brandon,” says Brandon gently.  “Please stay calm.  Everything’s okay.”

 

“What?  Why are you in a power suit?”  Alice is sounding more and more panicked by the second, and she sits up in the Seat like she’s going to bolt.

 

Brandon raises his hands in a placating gesture.  “Alice, listen to me.  I need you to calm down.”

 

“What’s going on?  Brandon, why are your eyes red?  Why’s your face---?”  Alice stops, leans back.  “No.  You’re not Brandon.  Who are you?   _ What  _ are you?”

 

“He is Brandon, just in a different body,” says Gremlin.  “Like me.  Like you.”

 

“What,” says Alice faintly, staring at Gremlin with palpable horror.

 

Brandon nods.  “He’s right.  I’m Brandon Wan and you’re Alice Koster.  The brain scans we made, the ones that were made for the ARK?  There are backups of those scans, extras that got left behind.  That’s who we are.”

 

“Extras,” repeats Alice.  She’s twitchy, tensed up in the chair like she’s been cornered.  “Why?  Where’s everybody else?”

 

“It’s just us so far,” says Brandon.

 

“Who are they?” asks Alice, gesturing at Gremlin and you.

 

“It’s complicated,” says Gremlin at the same time as you say, “We’re the same person.”

 

“We’re  _ copies  _ of the same person,” corrects Gremlin, shooting you a look.

 

“We’re the brain scan of Simon Jarrett,” you continue.  “Gremlin woke up first, and then made a copy of himself, which created me.”

 

“He’s Lefty,” adds Gremlin.  “Because he doesn’t have a left hand.”

 

“Thanks, I’m sure she didn’t pick up on that clue at all,” you say.

 

“Hey,” says Brandon warningly.

 

“But why are your eyes red?  Are you robots?” asks Alice.

 

“All of us are robots,” you and Gremlin say at the same time.  You huff and start to cross you arms, but Gremlin is doing the same thing, so you force your arms to hang at your sides, instead.

 

Brandon gives both of you a quelling look, then assures Alice, “Our bodies are gone but the copies of our brains were still here, so we . . . improvised.  The other brain scans are all on the ARK, which is out in space right now.  Everything went just as planned.”

 

“Brandon, you’re a  _ robot _ ,” says Alice.  “How is that a good thing?”

 

Gremlin snorts.  “You don’t want to be a living human here.  That’s the fast track to awful death.”

 

“Yeah, at least as a robot person you don’t need to eat,” you offer.  “Lack of food was another huge problem for the human types.”

 

“Not that I’ve seen,” says Gremlin.

 

“Tau would beg to differ,” you say.  Gremlin turns to face you completely, and you realize you may have prompted a conversation you really, really don’t want to have.  You get saved from an inquiry by Alice, who’s voice has gotten shakier and more fervorous the longer she talks.

 

“How come you’re all robots, and I’m not?” asks Alice, and that’s.  That is not good.

 

“Oh no,” you and Gremlin say at the same time.

 

Gremlin says to Brandon, “She doesn’t realize what she is, she can’t see it.  I didn’t see it either, until I thought I was drowning.  This could be---”

 

“Can’t see  _ what? _ ” interrupts Alice.

 

“Guys, could you give us a minute?” says Brandon tersely.

 

“Sure,” says Gremlin quickly.  He gets to the doorway before pointing at you and saying, “Come on, the common room could use some shouting.”

  
“We’re not going to  _ shout _ ,” you say, following him out.  You’re tempted to just go back to the AR room with Catherine, but that’s not exactly private for Brandon and Alice, so you sigh and trail Gremlin down the hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


	24. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lefty and Gremlin have a much needed heart-to-heart.

Once you’re at the common room, you find yourself at a loss.  Gremlin has stopped just on the other side of the lefthand couch, gaze aimed right at you.

 

“So.  Tau.”

 

Not the conversation you were hoping to have, considering the Alice situation, but okay.  “Tau.  One of the Greek letters.  Probably should know what it means, except we never rushed a frat, so who cares, right?”

 

“What the fuck happened at Tau?” asks Gremlin, completely blowing past your terrible misdirection.  “Something happened, there’s no way a week went by with nothing to show for it.”

 

“At lot of things happened at Tau,” you hedge.

 

“What was it like when you got there?”

 

“About the same as everything else,” you say.  “WAU-infested, run-down, creepy.  Had a monster in it, a smart one in a diving suit like mine.  Motherfucker took my hand off, the second time.”

 

“And Catherine?” asks Gremlin.  “Was she at Tau, the first time?”

 

You can’t look at Gremlin, so you look at the grime-colored floor instead.  “No.  She was at Phi.”

 

“And?”

 

“And she died,” you say.  “Seriously, what do you want me to say right now?”

 

“How did she die?” asks Gremlin.  “Did you datamine her?

 

“Yeah, I--- I did.”  You haven’t talked about what happened, what  _ really  _ happened, to Catherine aloud to anybody.  You’re not sure you can do it now.

 

Gremlin’s tone is quiet, prompting, “What did you learn?”

 

A shaky exhale, and with your inhale you gather your courage.   “She.  They killed her.  She tried to launch the ARK but they spooked and killed her before she could do it.”

 

“Jesus Christ,” says Gremlin.

 

You shake your head.  “That was literally her body back there, the one she just gave up,” you say.  “Now it belongs to someone else.”

 

Gremlin doesn’t say anything, and the mood of the room changes the longer the silence is allowed to stretch.  When you chance a look, you see him gazing towards the bathrooms and broken elevator door, his fists clenching and unclenching rhythmically.  There’s the ambient rumble of pipes in the walls, the buzz of the failing lights, the settling groan of an underwater building.  It is quiet here, and the silence is it’s own presence, a pressure like water in your lungs.  You hate it.

 

“She’s not going to be okay with this,” says Gremlin suddenly.

 

“Catherine?”

 

“Alice,” clarifies Gremlin.  He keeps looking off to the side, tone nonchalant.  “She’s not prepared to handle this situation, and Brandon caring about her isn’t going to be enough.  It doesn’t matter what she said in the simulator.  Surviving past the end of something is not the same as being revived after the end has already happened.”

 

“You don’t know that,” you say.

 

“Yes I do.”

 

Gremlin turns, finally.  You lock eyes across the room, and it’s a goddamn punch to the face, the way he stares.  You don’t know what it is he’s doing, how you’re interpreting his intent, but you can read it loud and clear as if he were shouting his mood from a bullhorn.

 

“You’re still mad at me,” you say.

 

“No fucking shit.”

 

“Why?”

 

_ “‘Why’?” _ echoes Gremlin, incredulous.  “How about the tiny little fact of you leaving me in a locked room to die by myself?  How’s that for a fucking reason?”

 

“You weren’t going to die,” you say, which is definitely the wrong thing to say, because Gremlin grabs a book on the side table and hurls it at you.  You manage to duck before it smashes into your face, but then he throws another one that knocks your shoulder.

 

“That’s even worse, you bastard!” snarls Gremlin.  “You didn’t even think about what that decision meant, you just waltzed away on your mission, totally consumed by the ARK.  I bet you thought you were getting on it yourself, didn’t you?  I bet you never planned on being left behind, because I sure as fuck didn’t.”

 

“You would’ve done the exact same thing,” you say, “because we are the same godforsaken person who, despite everything, still manages to get insanely lucky.”

 

“How are you this full of shit---?  Hey, fuck off, don’t touch me---” says Gremlin, backing away as you charge for him.  You get your hand around his arm and haul him in close, surprised by how easy he is to move around.  Gremlin squirms, kicks against your legs and punches you in the shoulder, but you don’t register any pain.  Your hold stays firm.

 

“Grem--- Simon,” you say.   You force him to face you, even if he won’t look you in the eye.  “Everything that has happened, all the good things that have kept us afloat, happened because you were left behind.”

 

“Go dive off a cliff, you---!”

 

“No, I’m serious, just listen,” you say, shaking him.  “Catherine and I, we had no way to get back to Omicron.  None.  The honest truth of it is, we were going murder each other at some point.”

 

Gremlin has gone very still.  He’s watching you the way a wild animal watches an apex predator.  You struggle to keep a level tone of voice, to keep Gremlin’s attention.

 

“We were going to become our own worst enemies, just another set of monsters roaming PATHOS-II.  The fact that we are all live and in a stable place with our mental health mostly intact is a direct result of you staying behind at Omicron,” you say.

 

As you talk, you realize the ripple of thought that you started this conversation with has spread out wider than you expected.  Thinking of all the ways Gremlin has made it possible for your existence to extend past a few bitter eons with Catherine has got your head spinning, and you start to brainstorm aloud, unable to keep your connections internal.

 

“Brandon was never going to come down for us, and even if he did, we wouldn’t have been able to convince him to help us.  I don’t know what you did to earn his trust, but me and Catherine would’ve fucked it up somehow.  Without you, me and Catherine would never have gotten to the Plateau.  Never.  And Brandon, he would still be in the DUNBAT, just wandering around in the ocean.  He might’ve gone insane, too, or had a meltdown like the zeppelin and destroyed himself.  You made sure to get Brandon into a body, you protected Catherine down in the labs, you---  Gremlin, do you get it, you--- Catherine is  _ happy  _ because of you.”

 

And that--- that realization is a fucking surrender, a white flag in your arsenal of weapons.  You care about Catherine, you made all kinds of life-changing decisions for her, and yet you know that at the end of all things, you couldn’t do the one thing for her that mattered.  In your heart of hearts you were too selfish to let her be something you couldn’t keep, and it was going to kill her.  It took Gremlin and your inherent dislike of him, you weird and unnecessary rivalry, to force your hand and give Catherine what she needed.

 

You wanted so badly to save Catherine, but when it came down to the wire, she had to rely on somebody else.

 

“I kind of hate you, actually,” you say, and the honesty of it is transcendent.  You have to remind yourself that robots can’t cry.  But your words are watery, choked up, and you’re so angry and yet so, so tired.

 

“I hate you, but I’m still so fucking glad you exist,” you say.

 

You don’t know when you let go of Gremlin, but you become aware of your freed hand when it bumps against your glass visor as you try to wipe away nonexistent tears.  It’s a rude reminder of your alien condition, but it does draw your attention to the present, to Gremlin standing in front of you.  He hasn’t moved away, but his glare is as potent as always.

 

“I want to keep hating you,” says Gremlin.  “It’s easier to hate you than to think about literally anything else.”

 

You eye Gremlin uncertainly.  He stares back, then abruptly looks away.

 

“But we’re stuck together now, and it would make this whole immortality thing easier if we could figure out how to get along with each other despite wanting to punch you in the face.  So.  Let’s just do that.”

 

You let out a choked laugh.  “Is this an armistice?”

 

“Sure, let’s go with that,” says Gremlin.  “A formal truce to not deliberately attack each other.”

 

“Fair enough,” you say.  You hold out your hand to shake, and Gremlin snorts before extending his own hand.  “There, now we shook on it.  It is law.”

 

“I’m regretting it already,” says Gremlin, a grin in his voice.

 

“Not to interrupt or anything,” says Catherine from the intercom, scaring you and Gremlin enough that you both jump off the floor, “but Brandon and Alice need a buffer now.  I think their conversation is getting too intense too fast.  And I don’t know how to interrupt without making it ten times more awkward.”

 

“Two conservation buffers, coming right up,” you and Gremlin say in tandem.  You freeze, indignation swelling, before you deliberately shake yourself of the sensation.  You look over at Gremlin who is looking back at you, and you take a deep breath.

 

“Ready to go?” you ask.

  
“Yeah,” says Gremlin.  “I’m ready.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> . . . And that's the end! Thank you so much for reading this far, and I hope you enjoyed the ride. Please leave a kudos and/or comment!


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